Past: Dorothy Iannone, Juliette Blightman

"...tarot, images drawn and illuminated shine to bounce around in your head to alight some new substance inside, like any painting. The further you believe in the drawing the more deeply it affects. A charm for wealth eventually brings it through stubborn physical existence to remind you that's what you value, seek. Any object's aboutness, its meaning, it tautologically enacts like a string tied around your finger: the string doesn't necessarily intrinsically symbolize "pick up eggs;" its meaning is conjured by the reminded who tied it...."

Read full: Dorothy Iannone, Juliette Blightman

Tom Allen at Air de Paris

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...more Berghain than cottagecore - to paraphrase the press release. The pleasure here seems in twisting the dial to the humming point between saccharine pleasure and spoiled overripeness - between day and night - a painting your mother "likes" with uncertainty. Allen seems to find pleasure in this sweet spot hum.

Tastes change however, but let these be a marker of 2020s - that this was the edge, the waver between sickness and wealth. Painting as stakes planted, this was the limit. So if you start to love these, see how far we've moved.

See too: Tom Allen at Lulu

Past: Tom Allen at Lulu

Flowers are the lighted landing strips of insect air travel. The Vegas sign advertising sex and nectar to bees, birds. What did Zizek say about tulips, "an open invitation to all insects and bees, 'Come and screw me.'"

And perhaps this crass evolutionary productivity might be why flowers are called "the lowest of the genres," gaming the system with hardwired desire. However what artist has ever been above cheating?

Flowers are 'an experimental-constant through which an artist may perform tortures on a cultural concept of beauty.' Vegas; Zizek again: "I think that flowers should be forbidden to children."

Tom Allen at Lulu

Marie Angeletti at Édouard Montassut

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The Rorschach inkblot is the ultimate symbol of art. It is exactly what we now demand: an interpretable stain, an endlessly inscrutable fount for "meaning" generation. The point is to see something, anything. That is really just handing the viewer back to them, what they see is what they see, valid and inconsequent. They are but shaped mirrors. 

see too: Marie Angeletti at Atlantis, Marie Angeletti at Beach Office

 Past: Tishan Hsu at Hammer Museum

"For years smartphones pressed to be seamless, this was the pinnacle of technologic interface, to lack the orifice that Hsu keeps pressing. A phone shouldn't look like it might drool, Instagram icons shouldn't look like a dank bathroom. Like Thek, or Lynch, the campiness is part of the grotesque. You take your phone away from face, a smear of your human grease marring its perfect black pool. We don't like our tech to feel like us. The more we interact with it, the more it becomes us, the most we want it not resemble us.

 Full: Tishan Hsu at Hammer Museum

Past: Marie Angeletti

"exacerbating all the annoyances of images today, Angeletti's are always claustrophobically opaque, too close, dim. Not quite sure Angeletti has ever shown in a completely lit space..."

"which, in an era of almost total fuck-all of images our cognition is molested by daily, could make an art practice mirroring such seem a brutal finger but at some point we have to be trained for this, we could attempt to make sense of, it all, if we wanted to start lifting."


see too: Marie Angeletti at Atlantis, Marie Angeletti at Beach Office

Alvin Baltrop at Hannah Hoffman

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These photos are lovely now as Baltrop receives his late laurels. It wasn't laureled then. A suffering that is made into "authenticity." Pain as sales value added. The valorization process of art. "hardship reclaimed like wood by collectors of such." Dominant culture lays the concrete of its social conditions, proclaims "look a dandelion has grown," hangs its photo in our halls as testament to humanity. But it can seem like a testament to the concrete. A mythos of suffering starts to feel like instructions for it.

See too: Alvin Baltrop at Daniel Buchholz, Purvis Young at James Fuentes