Ben Schumacher at Weiss Falk

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Trading one techno for another, all the gloss of server racks, acrylic and glass exchanged for a roughdraft music fest. The success of fail of this artistic gamble, trading laser cut aluminum for cardboard, is placed on whether people cared for your ideas or that your art had looked like a new idea. It is a proposal.


See too: Ben Schumacher at Musee d’art contemporain de Lyon, Ben Schumacher at Bortolami

Daan van Golden at Micheline Szwajcer

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Wasn't the promise of van Golden's some eternal nubility, a candy whose wrapper never left it.
A sort of perenniality. Old paintings that don't look it. van Golden died in 2017, but paintings fresh. Wasn't that the promise of art. You physically cannot remove the wrapper.

Juliana Huxtable at Reena Spaulings

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Difficult to write a history of the internet without mentioning its catalyzing a complete restructuring of identity that had been then slow simmering. The early dictum "No one on the internet knows you're a dog" had its counterpart: "No one on the internet doesn't know you're not a dog" and thus the furry. This was a miracle. Be who you were. An immaculate conception the IRL has yet to absorb and thus the Brillo pad friction when it irrupted in. We binged cartoons as Disney children to manifest them later in Goofy costumes, the Saturday morning cartoon education we devoured alongside hyper-processed cereals mapping our internal worlds in the same malleable cartoon goo. The world a cartoon, at least make yourself an artist.


See too: Juliana Huxtable, Carolyn Lazard at Shoot the Lobster, Eva Fàbregas at Kunstverein München, Lisa Yuskavage at Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis

Since the Venus of Willendorf's tiny talisman, 30 thousand years of humankind's representing fetishizing, totemizing the maternal. Leading today to Yuskavage's ambrosial hazes. The feast of the Vanitas' balanced by looming overripeness. For Yuskavage this balance to its too-sweetness is made through its subtle representational violence against the women depicted, who in attaining this otherworldly ripeness are subject to subtle deformities, missing arms, noses, butts like egg sacs, breasts manipulated by invisible strings, contorted and culled to the desires of a culture. And Everyone wondering whether Nicki's butt is real, furry porn grown from Saturday cartoons given bodies like overinflated water-balloons, and subsections of violent pornography where the maternal is extracted and policed by the programmatic systems of capitalist production, in bondage and milked called human cow - there is a lot proving our cultural relation to maternal is at least a little fraught, and Yuskavage's paintings are a very tasteful representation of that.

J. Parker Valentine at Misako & Rosen

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Lines, they delineate. So, failing to produce the object, the quasi is given to viewer, an inkblot, a form they construct.  "difficult to articulate" the PR says, becomes painting of a mirage, handing the goo to a viewer left to sort spaghetti formed lines like tea leaves in you all along. Pareidolia.

Past: J. Parker Valentine

"expectations of legibility, depictive of some tip-of-the-tongue subject within a library of means detailing the amorphous thing it circles but fails to produce. There is the lure of subject object, the thing that will at any moment manifest itself in the definitive lines of drawing"


J. Parker Valentine at Juan and Patricia Vergez Collection, J. Parker Valentine at Park View

Jeanette Mundt at Overduin & Co.

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Of gymnasts, the paintings lack their subject's deftness. Motion is given to a square smear. Instead Mundt's exude something permanently flat, dry. A relation to their subject is ambivalent despite their load. Mundt often targets content that is full of juice, yet is left on canvas to fall apart. A gap that reviewers seem unable to fill with their own: Travis Diehl seemed to conjure the process of glaucoma's blindness; Tess Edmonson said about the film on which a painting was based: "the gallerist warned me not to watch it"; and Zoë Lescaze aptly called it "ready for viewers and critics to plot their opinions onto her body." Her body of work which fails to deliver on the subject. Failure isn't an interesting painting strategy in 2019 - we did that ten years ago -  but maybe a generous read is that these aren't so much failing as crumpling, like car hitting its subject.