Doris Guo at Bodega

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"mementos of that sentimentally thick effect of decor working socially called 'ambience.' Bottled atmosphere ferments..."

Sculpture as an image, like Mander's Nocturnal Garden Scene (who make Louise Nevelson seem underrated), beneath Spoerri's table settings, the underneath, the legs become the portal, cavern, the place we spent time as children, under what holds the adult's Morandis, in the nocturnes, in the maw, against mother's legs clutched, we found worlds in forts constructed, in makeshift boxes, a certain heat to the darkness. We're not really allowed under the tables anymore, so of course the magic trip stops halfway.
Surrealism sure, but striking.


See too: Gertrude Abercrombie at Karma

Past: Ian Rosen

"Rosen is to art what golf is to sport. Removing its physical aspects to magnify its mental stressors and fine muscle finesse of putting the ball in its proper hole with the least sweat. A methodical game for Rosen's name sunk in the proper places of art's social field."
"Presciently, Bruce Hainley understood early, eerily, the limitations of interest in Rosen’s work in a review based on a sole photograph in a single show when the artist was still working in physical space. Hainley muses on discerning between acts of “grooming” from “genuine distress,” reaching out for “contact,” the review reads as sage advice/stern warning to the young artist more than addressing Artforum readers. A game of gathering artworld credibility, that Hainley acknowledged his complicity with, in which you are a pawn with one distinct choice, of saying yes or no, but after that the moves are all already preloaded into Rosen’s game."


Read full: Ian Rosen at The Finley, Ian Rosen at Kristina Kite

Jose Zuniga at Central Fine

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Gaugin covered his pedophilia in colors more tasteful than the brashness of van Gogh or even Cezanne. Perhaps erupting in syphilitic sores made promiscuous color seem gratuitous, requiring some restraint, some decorum. A fear of wonton rashes expressing itself in total palette control. And so Gaugin's color is academic, goody two shoes, annoying.
The obvious Schutz references probably have as much to do with who is being stolen from as anything, and its nice to see things stolen.

Tomma Abts at The Art Institute of Chicago

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The monastic adherence to a form could become its own gratification, refusal, a withholding that feels like control over its pleasure. Or the canvases' ascetic ground a soil ripe for tilling. Instead the cut corners of mild invention placidly chose neither, shaped with a sorta-not-sorta-evolution for the form. It's a wildly unexciting development, threatening the whole enterprise with its contaminant arbitrariness, the whole hermetic tight-ass pleasure suddenly loosed with an open cavity. You can't cut the paper in origami, and if you did, you would expect results better than this. And perhaps then that is the point, of a relaxed attitude or orifice, a bit more air in the room, the painting, unlike a well made chair, doesn't need to stand up, because it will do so under scrutiny to call that air its fourth leg, painting is in fact arbitrary, we can hope for nothing else, even if we had hoped for something else.

Past: Toma Abts

"That despite Zwirner’s PR qualifying Abts as “continuously explor[ing] the activity of painting,” and not simply “painting” like a Neanderthal, Abts is a painter, and, since we’ve long forgotten how to speak about “dumb” painting, everyone instead argues why these aren’t, and instead speak of an “emotional rationality” and “anything but expressionist,” spreading pesticides against the fear of the subject reappearing like selves in the mirror.

"a triumph of deafness, buckling-down to the same task endlessly, slowly, stubbornly insisting on the cobwebbed autonomy of painting long ago cut and bled out.

"The pleasure of Abts’s paintings is that of origami, or well constructed puzzle, like setting a good corner in New Mexico pasture, solving simply its own internal puzzling, like shaker furniture, a clever construction in a protestant like satisfaction of a few-frills job completed."

Read full: Tomma Abts at David Zwirner, Tomma Abts at greengrassi

Mario García Torres at Walker Art Center

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CAD presentation of Garcia Torres's work whose loss of the requisite information contained in didactics jettisoned, the info sent asea that would have allowed any remotely complete picture (since the GT's is often the oral myth of the didactic anyway), itself becomes a GT work for its, again, circumcision of the package, a clipping omission that refuses whole narrative. There's information missing, and you can fill it with whatever,  a hole we call poetic. A group of scientists thought that perhaps the best way to spread messages intergenerationally into the future, past the reaches of language, was not simple symbols like skulls for death, but rather to create a myth, in this case a fear of glowing cats. Whether or not the cats glow in the future doesn't matter, the point is the scientists were successful because I'm telling you now.

K.r.m. Mooney at Altman Siegel

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Cady Noland's handcuffs were jewelry for metallized wrists, about we attach people to a world. A pearl sets off the clavicle. SFchronicle called them "spiritless" after getting it correct that"their relationship to the body is part of the art." And the gallery wears them, their wreckage as jewels. Lack the imagination to see the institution as the digestive body that it is. The engraving block shown here is intended to anchor small fine things to the earth. So they can be manipulated into delicate forms. Here - without its rubber base - untethered, a listless buoy weighted. In the other room copper bite plates allow you an orthodontics to ground yourself in the case of electrical storm as well as wear the institutions like bling: the white walled architecture clenched to your teeth like a grill. Some of Paul Wall's grills cost $30,000 but these walls cost more.


See too: Lucy Skaer at MRAC, K.r.m. Mooney at Pied-á-terre