Tom Król at Neuer Aachener Kunstverein

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"Artists have such a strange relation to the face, to our lumpen forms. ... No matter what gratuitous things they do it, whatever fingers clawed through it, we recognize it. Perhaps reason to hate it, through the violence it remains, you can get a smile."

And the face is a surface display, a graphical user interface, like a particularly nuanced iPad, so why not peacock its plumage, blast it with painting.


see too: Chloe Seibert at Mickey, The violence against faces., Nathaniel Mary Quinn at Rhona Hoffman & Genesis Tramaine at Almine Rech

Josh Smith at David Zwirner

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Wow.. this press release is practically bulging with self-pleasure:
"First" "Infinite" "instantly" "absolutely everything" "A whole new world" "immediate" "now" "the spirit" These are the words you can buy with blue chips. The artist is pure experience, sensation. Plugged into the raw. So, it doesn't matter they look like bad post-impressionism, the point is that the artist is electric - is channelling. Dancing around saying the word Truth.

Past: Josh Smith
"Guyton, Walker, Price, a group for whom production was theme: recycling, automation, dispersion and Smith's prolificacy spamming himself into consciousness with grotesque versions to prove the mass, beating his name and himself in the head."

"now they sorta look just like any other painting made today. The wild importance of Fordist speed (and its in-distinction) creating busywork spam into cultural consensus..."

"the final internment of line between critical and sellout"

"Maybe what Smith actually provides is relief. Against paintings overdetermined ... Smith's is an interminable vacation to fields of ever stupid flowers. None of these painting individually matter. Functional. Require zero attention. Just exist like idiotic specimens of a genus Smith...."


Read full: All posts tagged Josh Smith, Josh Smith at David Zwirner, Josh Smith at at Eva Presenhuber, Josh Smith at Bonner Kunstverein, Josh Smith at STANDARD (OSLO)

Jacqueline de Jong at Rodolphe Janssen

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Stylistic violence never registered strongly in painting. Like Picasso or de Kooning ripping and rearranging people, it's often mere composition. I've never found Guernica all that horrific. Abstraction's pulling reads less like the horror of war and more like the whims of painter. Ambiguous violence - of someone like Miriam Cahn - forces a viewer to complete the picture in their head, imagine their own violence.

Louise Sartor at Le Consortium

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Images are worthless. Painting is made rare and thus valuable for its support, its anchor to reality. But the canvas was also intended to disappear behind the image. So that support starts to hyperbolize, exaggerate. Placing stakes to claim existence, location tethering, against images lost on networks. Materiality self-sites, claims an objecthood. Painters protecting their domain. "today’s painting, after all, has to contend with iPhone screens."

See too: Brian Calvin at Le Consortium, Oliver Osborne at Peles Empire (Matte Representation)

Past: Eric Wesley

"Wesley's ability to mock what contains him, a laughable institutional crit whose assault is the brilliant dumbening of art dialect. The Burrito is hot right now. You've got Murillo's 300k one, Flame's mockery of, Bader's continual replenishing it as category, and Wesley's endless one. The difference here is Wesley's insistence of the burrito not its signifier ... to actually work with the burrito, which morphs to Taco Bell here, to force that most base of architecture to reflect on the walls..."


Read full: Eric Wesley at Midway Contemporary Art, Eric Wesley at Bortolami

Past: Magnus Andersen 

"It's impossible to measure earnestness. Time de-ironizes and jest is made serious by attention. Saying one is more authentic, or by comparing hierarchically these two is a set-up for defeat. You could say (with a long enough timeline) 'the necessities of circumstance turn to virtue.' Andersen knows that to survive is to triumph. And so with defeat you must accept its march into visibility. [...] Thus Andersen 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 condition in which hostages develop a psychological alliance with their captors during captivity.'... 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