Past:Karl Holmqvist at Sant’Andrea de Scaphis

"..we trust words, our whole society practically predicted on words, everywhere, magnificent and fragile. So the Holmqvistic hammering of words into tin for his cymbal tapping repetition could feel either charmingly disruptive or cruel.  Holmqvist has expressed less affinity for jazz than for noise, words become the sensation of objects felt with a numb hand, the cacophony of nerves deprived...."

"A rose is a rose is a rose, there is a long history of this use of semantic satiation: the repeated arousal of a specific neural pattern causing "a reduction in the intensity of the activity with each repetition" - effectively numbs like our hands our ability to perceive them with any force but some wide flat plainness, deprived of structure to give its words lifeblood like sucking nitrous from balloons until the world dissolves into a stupefied vertigo, and we feel the noise, the static of our brains deprived.


Read full: Karl Holmqvist at Sant’Andrea de Scaphis

Past: Alvin Baltrop at Daniel Buchholz

"His situation's precarity, a gay black man in the 1970s, is expressed on the surface of the photographs themselves, in its tentativeness, his body's extreme vulnerability."


Read full: Alvin Baltrop at Daniel Buchholz

Past: Judith Hopf 

"Each brick lain a decision by the artist to continue."



Read full: Judith Hopf at Museion, Judith Hopf at kaufmann repetto

Marguerite Humeau at Clearing

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An excess of reference. B I O M O R P H I C. Biologic inkblots. 2010's Surrealism has metastasized into camp, into theatrics. Once clocks melted, now whales do, stretched, ballooned, dragged in the virtual and dropped in the physical, cast in medical looking material (which is its own trend). Ten years ago we all thought Matthew Barney was too much, now look at us. We've literally reinvented him over and over.


See too: “Being Thing” at Centre International d’Arte et du Paysage & Treignac Projet,

“Ungestalt” at Kunsthalle Basel

Past: Kaoru Arima

"Drawing was at one time a knowledge. Drawing of fetuses cut from cadavers were cutting edge science. The limits of knowledge were defined by looking at something really hard. When science and tech jettisoned oils and pencils from its repertoire modern artists got mad and crushed representation into something resembling a crumpled Coke can, seeing all sides at once, and this violence was lauded. "
"...human features bludgeoned to bloom bruise, bouquets, or apply rictus like geometries, portraits of a stroke. On and on painters rushing to injustice portraits... Here, the face is more figurative idea, an outline, a Jawlensky like framework for which to hang wanton libidinal paint. ...We find its horror almost playful, cute, even interesting, a learned tolerance for pain."


Read full: Kaoru Arima at Misako & Rosen, Kaoru Arima at Queer Thoughts

Kelly Akashi, Cayetano Ferrer at PP

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More exhibitionist materiality. Open the wardrobe to expose the wood. We so desperate for some woodgrain to counteract the glass we see everything through. We crave touch, sensibility, sense, something to counteract this numbness from everything electric, world rendered. This materialist becomes conflated with the authentic, the rustic. Stripped. But, no matter how much you want it, do not touch the art. Leaving everyone with a case of erotic sexual denial.


See too: Olga Balema at High Art (2) Olga Balema at High Art (1) Olga Balema at Bridget Donahue, Daniel Lefcourt at Blum & Poe, ektor garcia at Cooper Cole, N. Dash at Casey Kaplan

N. Dash at Casey Kaplan

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These are bit more compositionalized, more arty, but at base they are still the butterflies, material, pinned behind glass, catalogs of physical sensations you see but cannot touch. Materiality porn. "...a very modern problem, our world, mediated by screens, the totality of which becomes enshrined in gallery or touch screen glass, and art is the world's development project in all the ways to [build] a materiality so strong it visually empaths itself, that we could actually feel something through glass.""[these,] images, unable to be tactile, to make sensuality palpable irrupts strange fetishes: pornography must materialize its sensitivities by finding visual equivalents for touch. " "Bodies that photograph well." "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"


Olga Balema at High Art (2) Olga Balema at High Art (1) Olga Balema at Bridget Donahue, Daniel Lefcourt at Blum & Poe, ektor garcia at Cooper Cole, N. Dash at Casey Kaplan