Jongsuk Yoon at Galerie nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder

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Turning Frankenthaler into the cotton candy it's become for collectors, what was latent become libidinal. Stirring the surface into a delightfully consumable substance.

Past: Mark Manders at Zeno X

"...This stasis, like a pause, blurs sculpture as its image, blur their bronze eternality with the fresh moment they inhabit. A moment replaced with its object. To be both an object and its ossification, the chair is still a chair even if it's a sculpture of it... It's a subtle thing treating the world as an image, masking the violence of our treatment of it as such."


Read full: Mark Manders at Zeno X

Paul Lee at David Shelton

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Composition is the stirred pot activating subterranean content. The dead drum highlights how far we've left the possibility of something, anything. Because nothing has become content.


see too: Paul Lee at Maccarone, Paul Lee at Karma

Past: Paul Lee

"[PR:]'These tambourines will not be touched and will not make a sound—their potential for movement or rhythm is only possible through a pictorial plane.' ... like all handmade art eventually hung on walls, only ever now touched through gloves or sight, it is a sort of sad existence after all the grunting love of the painter stretching the canvas, rubbing it with oils, or whatever. Somebody cared once, paintings like ashtrays of that touch."


Read full: Paul Lee at Maccarone, Paul Lee at Karma

Mark A. Rodriguez at Park View/Paul Soto

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Too bad that "meme" came to mean the whatever-viral-image, rather than its original broader biological definition of any self-replicating social phenomenon. The specificization snipped a useful term for the reproduction/evolution of ideas/ideology, the way we pass along and create thought, deem it useful. Socrates' words living on in 2020 is a meme; Rupert Murdoch invented a memetic form of conservative dogma. The survivability of ideas. It's not propaganda but a much more supple thing, the ability to be not just striking images, but echoing on. To make ideology replicate, teach children thumbs up from thumbs down.

Anna Zacharoff at Neue Alte Brücke

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"...Drawing ripples in surface to activate the beneath, tap the vast depths of painting's cultural wealth"

Previously:
1

Like cutting a rose from a watermelon, everyone wants the sweet fruit but we facet a composition. This is a metaphor for painting.

2
The watermelon in the metaphor is that essence "painting" - that unconscious object, myth, we all have some benign feelings towards, painting. And [Marlene] Dumas provides illustration: got famous for theatricalizing its juice struggling against the container, composition, corral.

3
Because it seems what we are actually pushing around on the canvas is the cultural object of painting. The canvas, support, oils, were long ago replaced by this mythos, the actual material, its signifiers, significance.

4
Paint becomes simply the candied shell to painting's cultural myth. Doesn't matter how thin because it's merely the container/shape of our love for "painting." As thin as marginally abstracted t-shirts. Drawing ripples in surface to activate the beneath, tap the vast depths of painting's cultural wealth, this the watermelon.

5
A lot of painting functions by tensioning the relationship between painting and its cultural myth - think the Neanderthalism of Joe Bradley, Krebber, or conceptually negated Sturtevant, the printer of Guyton, the signature of Josh Smith, the bruising history of von Wulffen, necrotics of Richter, the fordist production lines of Koons, Craven, Murakami, Kaws. Etc. Neurotic affairs with "painting." But occasionally painting succeeds by making us forget the relation to its myth, succeeds as a painting without history, paints something else and Painting we get to forget about.

Previously: (1)Julie Beaufils at Balice Hertling, (2)Marlene Dumas at Zeno X, (3)Svenja Deininger at Collezione Maramotti, (4)Eliza Douglas at Air de Paris,  (5)Nazim Ünal Yilmaz at Exile

See too: Anna Zacharoff at Kantine

Josephine Pryde at Galerie Neu

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Genre being the capsule that allows immediate swallowing: "They're about touch." What Isabelle Graw called "straightforwardly thematic." And so we understand them like a trojan horse, internalize with ease. Ostensibly later spring forths the latent soldiers, medicine. But it might be the gulping was the trick. Getting you to immediately get them. The cuteness of gerbils, the joke of consumption.