Past: Olga Balema

" ... both art and pornography must materialize its sensitivities by finding visual equivalents for touch. "  "Our touch, now more than ever, comes from sight, comes from packages of it in the high definition of images and advertising, we feel through sight"

"over-inflated carcass of rotting whale PVC fetishists"

"the demands for artwork, like pornography, to photograph well... Now, here a show that doesn't photograph well. Instead, like tires danced through by hulking men on tiptoes, your body staged in tripwires. Connections others have made to the history of empty galleries miss the fact that A, the gallery is full of things and B, empty galleries do not require such care where you step. (The read of "empty" seems, again, evidence of our perception now dominated by sight rather than haptic presence, proprioception, etc.) ... This is another means of making the body appear, nervous, a perhaps long theme of Balema, but without resort to the "excess body", the biomorphic, lumpy, intestinal. ..."

Full: Olga Balema at Bridget Donahue, Olga Balema at High Art (2), Olga Balema at High Art (1), Olga Balema at Croy Nielsen, Olga Balema, Geta Brătescu at Galerie Barbara Weiss

Past: Magnus Andersen 

"It's impossible to measure earnestness. Time de-ironizes and jest is made serious by attention. Saying one is more authentic is a set-up for defeat. Andersen knows that to survive is to triumph. ... Thus straps a bomb to his chest walks into the vault of images, which we his visual hostages, on a long enough timeline, learn to love, and pied man leading children to their deaths."

"An exhibition titled "Stockholm Syndrome" ... a decades long acclimatization to certain types of aesthetic abuse, where an artworld begins to actually like the Jeff Koons, or Josh Smith.  On a long enough timeline they begin to appear quaint, lovable, despite their demonics. To deny it would simply place you outside it. ... and as always with hideous painting, 'half the fun is learning to love it.'"

Read full:Magnus Andersen at Neue Alte Brücke(2), Magnus Andersen at Neue Alte Brücke & Dorothy Iannone at Air de Paris

Past: Vittorio Brodmann

"for Brodmann style is suspended  in the dispersed particles of [art's] past participants, in the soup of its references, closing in on the liquify setting of its blender."

"By turning the painting into an accumulation of "Brodmann moments", in a sort cave-painting/graffito mode, Brodmann compositionalizes his semio-capital, transmuting it into information, into a field of redirects failing to place it anywhere, turning it into painting as sort of recursive field, allowing to renege on the artist task of "be Brodmann" while being Brodmann."

Past: Vittorio Brodmann at Halle Für Kunst Lüneburg, Vittorio Brodmann at Freedman Fitzpatrick, Vittorio Brodmann at Gregor Staiger

David Rappeneau at Queer Thoughts, New York

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Hold a fashion magazine up to warbled silver. The effect ostensibly providing the "nightmare" and "post-apocalypse" to what otherwise are a snapchat's night out. They just look fun. You can't out nihilist fashion - that's a loser's game - these already begun their pleasance. If they were paintings they'd already be on the high courts walls. Their crayon applies a backrooms feel, underdog, pulled from the notebook of a derelict clown. Their paper being their critical strength. Otherwise they'd just be silver mirrors. 

 

Liz Craft at Centre d'édition contemporaine, Geneva

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Craft's investment in our emoji-ification - the way we relinquish representation/communication to symbols and mannequins. Yellow orbs to replace us, pareidolialy, trash compose face. It's easy and we're good at it. That we identify with the dead eyes of Ms. Pac-man. That speech bubbles can shrink wrap anything. The frame explain its function, even when there is none, it comes flooding, like a painting. We will always see something in them, singing signing. 

Liz Craft at Real Fine Arts, Liz Craft at Jenny’s

Past: David Rappeneau

"the youth are bored, despondent, they are nervous and pallid, but worst they're nostalgic. Cylindric reference reflects in anamorphosis to project history as bigger than it..  Looking back to see yourself reflected in the glass already containing all the gold you can fish, to find yourself trapped on the silver side of the mirror, your reflection. And Rappeneau's endless inscriptions in this silver surface, this hypertrophied advertorial ennui.."

Past: David Rappeneau at Queer Thoughts, David Rappeneau at Queer Thoughts

Past: Liz Craft

"could wish our communicado could find space for ethereal content, walls to text become brick to evoke a feeling rather than language, emoji mise-en-scene."


Liz Craft at Real Fine Arts, Liz Craft at Jenny’s