Charline von Heyl at Petzel, Deichtorhallen

(Petzel, Deichtorhallen)

No longer devotionals of ab-ex maybe not only because they draw from advertising and cultural chutzpa at large, but because they are dishonest. The impressionist showed the strokes that the Academy would have buffed, and winning the historical argument paintings ever since have performed this honesty as Truth. Which these don't suggest any cathedral of Truth. Instead just sorta flip-out, covering and masquerading a can-can, like a painting in slow state of clonic seizure, and gesticulation as a sort of cerebral-visual paradox, optical illusion, disguise. What Kelsey called Big Joy could also be a state of mania, or anxious outburst, like seeing your friend on amphetamines and wondering what about his personality you liked in the first place. Abstraction is the friend in this metaphor. Because these paintings are brutal. I keep coming back to their somehow relation to the FEED, to the anxious state of transitionary image, of scrolling. "painterly recognition that is particular, depleting, and manic." People love these and I could stop talking about them if someone would write that their praise, that what we are all enjoying, is the delirious feeling of being struck in the face with air. Your eyes are a pillow and these things like fists.



See too: Charline von Heyl at Gisela Capitain, Charline von Heyl at Capitain Petzel

Past: Charline von Heyl at Gisela Capitain, Charline von Heyl at Capitain Petzel

"like being struck, designed with the force of icons and logos, instantaneous recognition, the paintings connect with a speed prophetic of the contemporary and understandable that her rise delayed would coincide with that of digital networks: von Heyl's paintings turn composition into a kind of semio-transaction of consumption"


Full: Charline von Heyl at Gisela Capitain
Full: Charline von Heyl at Capitain Petzel

Markus Oehlen at Karma International

(link)

1985, Kuspit; Artforum:

"Werner Büttner, Martin Kippenberger, Albert Oehlen, Markus Oehlen

METRO PICTURES

I admire these artists quirkiness, irreverence, and contempt. I first saw their work several years ago in Germany, and I’m glad to see they’ve become still more perverse or saucy, to use a word they like. One can label their work neo-Dadaist, which suggests that their attitude is more important than the objects they make. Certainly they seem to aspire to become sacred monsters, although that’s nothing you can work at, even when you have command of seemingly limitless reserves of (Dadaist) disgust; the world makes your monstrousness happen.
However large the range of their activities—they write as well as make music—it is as painters that these artists exist in New York. No doubt their painting is just another kind of performance, but it leaves behind a deliciously smelly residue. It is this odor of garbage that attracts us. We sense that the artists are trying to set painting right after it has betrayed us by pretending that it can become attractive flesh hanging in museums and apartments. Garbage must be garbage, in the name of the honest truth; this claim of authenticity is a traditional one, like many others around today, but it’s harder to resist than the others, for history and art history’s pile of garbage continues to grow. Compost heaps are never out of fashion. These young Germans, like true youth everywhere, are obsessed with the decay of both art and meaning, which they have decided to enjoy with as many crocodile tears as possible. They have seen through everything; they know the shiftiness of everything; they know shit is the only substance eternally present. They quote Dali with approval: “I don’t like it when something goes in the nose and comes out the anus, but I love that which slips in the anus and exits through the eye.” They have restored paranoia to its original anality, making images and meanings, and of course paint, into so much shit they playfully offer the world that has mothered them.
[...]
I prefer not to take them seriously, though, but to enjoy their spiteful antibourgeois satire as part of the eternal return of shit.

"

The shit, for Markus Oehlen, a toolboxing of cultural forms slapped in maximalist congealings of it, forced to eat it all, more Charline von Heyl but directed by James Cameron. 

Bri Williams at Interface

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PR stating the show "powerfully (and aggressively) evokes sexual violence" when no object seems its vessel and instead saturating the air like a humidity. Perhaps the pipe thrust through the chair's ass waves the flag of the content surrendered to. Everything else just accumulating the dew in our search of it, starts to rust and rot because it's hard to keep things shiny clean when trauma lingers, things just sort of fall apart, continuously, like building a tower in seawater while everyone else builds theirs on dry land. Salt has a tendency to creep, to corrode. Not easily cleaned. Soap we consider clean but we wouldn't want to touch a bar found on the floor of a public shower. If I covered you in lye, your body would turn to soap, a simple process of an alkaline solution mixing with fatty tissues, "liberating" your glycerine. Why you feel "slippery" if you get any on your hand. When you turn to soap, called corpse-wax, or scientifically "adipocere," with a wick run through you we could burn you like an incredibly detailed human candle. This is true. Mistaken professors have done it.

Haegue Yang at Fondazione Furla

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Decorous displays of the mass produced, of the stuff clogging transaction's pipes hung like Christmas trees to capitalism. The store catalog was admittedly her bible and "abstraction" the presentation of it. Abstraction doesn't seem to precisely describe Yang's compositionalization of mass market crap. Unless "abstraction" is taken to mean some form of Marxist fetishization, that these might simply be ugly abscesses of global labor displayed for "abstraction." Like trophies to capital. People make those blinds, handle those bells.You can buy any amount, fill any space, the labor is liquid. The skins of people's sweat hung up.

Maria Lassnig at Kunstmuseum St. Gallen

(link)

Everything mutant. Many explained well; Johanna Burton: "an animated approximation of the homunculus replete with all manner of magnifications and obfuscations, ostensible distortions that operate—counterintuitively, perhaps—in the name of not realism per se but perhaps something like a corporeal existentialism." or on Lassig, Paul McCarthy: "Francis Bacon does not know how to paint backgrounds."

So a note on the lighting, which Lassnig's is the cool bleaching of fluorescent "bright white." Tele-visual light. The light of the millennial gallery. Inundated enough by that coldness, the dawning of CAD and the seared product photography of contemporary art, our eyes to acclimate, so we could finally see it. Lassnig painting for years what would finally shine on it. And under the cool colors of "cheery palette of soft pinks, blues and green" there's always something yellow underneath, a lemon squeezed on metal, something pissy. A tendency for picture rot, like urine on the table despite the embalming light for your dissection. Lassnig: "The picture is very yellow, much yellower than in reproductions."


See too: Maria Lassnig at MoMA PS1

Past: Maria Lassnig

Past: Maria Lassnig at MoMA PS1


"It’s the ones that run near amok that are best... the subject-object problem permutes as prescient proto-version of Sillman’s bodies-that-matter imbued formalism, and many others..."




Past: Maria Lassnig at MoMA PS1