Past: Raimer Jochims at Jacky Strenz, Raimer Jochims at Jacky Strenz

"...an indifference to fitting explicably well within contemporary grey flesh, like glass shard splinters or loose teeth's minor annoyance become ugly..."



Click: Raimer Jochims at Jacky Strenz 1, Raimer Jochims at Jacky Strenz 2

“Tiger-Poems & Songs for Hurricanes” at Travesía Cuatro

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"If this so called pre-primitivism allows us to shake the foundations of our epistemological pride, then this “perspective” is a valuable one, that should be re-activated constantly in times of visual overconfidence."

visual overconfidence. The argument for painting "primitively" as a reaction against our new techno razzle dazzle's authority, presenting a frailer subject requiring a viewer's empathy and understanding rather than administering a visual flexing to stand in for validity. Like breaking your dog's leg before the dog show, you won't win the prize, but you might get a people's choice award.

Past: Gijs Milius at Gaudel de Stampa

"We try to make the body reappear and it appears as a cartoon, which we're mad about. Our cartoon bodies extrapolated from the growing prevalence of data and numbers domineering discussions of humans. The "broad picture" we use for governance. People as populations. Everything feels like a cartoon in this virtuality because you can do great violence to it. A million jobs lost, a million jobs gained. Tom whacks at Jerry with a mallet like an axe. Jerry distends."


Click: Gijs Milius at Gaudel de Stampa

Abraham Cruzvillegas at Kurimanzutto

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the excellent sculptures that particular regions of urbanites create to reserve parking places? Wikipedia's article calls them Parking Chairs, Chicago calls them "dibs" but you see many versions across the world less furniture orientated. Mexico City's particularly robust parking-object scene. The sculptural emergence from, seemingly, several requirements, first that they be of no particular value (negating theft), constructed of what's available, and, lending their aesthetic quality, must designate their intentionality and refute themselves as refuse or castoffs, detritus, but instead purposed, creating a particular design problem of how to use trash to denote property, the construction as symbol for intent, and all the incredible vernacular and jury-rigged beauty with it that Cruzvillegas pilfers.


see too: Mark Grotjhan at Karma

Past : Lena Henke at Kunstverein Braunschweig & Louise Bourgeois at Cheim and Read, Lena Henke at Kunsthalle Zürich


"...apparent in those like Henke for whom physical things act as moments of duplicity, locus for multiple apparencies, big black table eyes. There is too many things to say about these things, looking like too much, their genericsm becomes strength. A low poly mesh provides metaphorical possibility in its low resolution. The harder it is to define things the larger their aqueous potential..."



Click: Lena Henke at Kunstverein Braunschweig & Louise Bourgeois at Cheim and Read, Lena Henke at Kunsthalle Zürich

Orion Martin at Bodega

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the roughly two inches of depth that Martin allows as pans for the sifting of images, cultural gold, and perhaps owing to Beckman's claustro-orgies, updating that era's expressionism is for this one's iPhone sheen, both's cultural unconscious brought up and pressed against the glass for our peering zoological efforts. The "shreds of childhood half-memories made manifest, and fleshed out with so much lurid detail that it feels confrontational" with the images we have internally seared into us, cultural echoes rattling around inside your head's quiet moments occasionally materializing from the noise of your brain a jingle from 30 years ago. What we are forced to carry and not sure exactly what the surrealists were planning as the point of irrupting the subconscious onto the page when it seems to be a lot like dredging some kind of horrible cultural sewer pipe and we cramming snakes into it.


See too: Emily Mae Smith at Rodolphe Janssen, Quintessa Matranga at Freddy

Paul P., B. Wurtz at Cooper Cole

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or that the details aren't trivial. They are the attachments of care, sewing buttons to close coats around a warmth when a guardian can't. Paul. P's sensitivity in the liquid touch, its a bit easier to explain, caressing faces in fluids, the pigments absorb into paper like blood into cheeks blushing, paper becomes skin to engorge. Wurtz's more homely space is all about knots tied, and buttons threaded, plastic bags hung to dry. They're dumb objects rescued by so much simple care like responsibility shown for them.


See too: B. Wurtz at Lulu, “The Crack-Up” at Room East (B. Wurtz)