Thursday, November 13, 2014

Ida Ekblad at Herald St.

Installation View (Herald St.)
Courtesy: Herald St, London.

Having just mentioned painters hands lost in the turning of printing presses painting, here Ekblad arrives making what appear as, though cannot be certified by bombastic press release’s purple prose, monoprint paintings.

Like spaghetti fallen out of pockets in embarrassment - What was once the artist’s distinct color-forms clearly delineated and arranged, what was composed, has been melted into a miasma of stringy faux-naive fuck-all mess, of neophyte graffiti dusting, of everything crumbling. Previous work’s rational ordered pleasure traded for the irrationality of the abject, anal expulsive, as orders fail and worms grow into the corpse and a dried-scab cartoon characters appear to mock your desire for some return to good taste. Their illogic is a horror. Of course half the fun is learning to love it, this next step of gross painting.
Like Josh Smith it was the brash confidence of signatory strokes that held together their flimsy palmed aesthetic. Now the brash confidence of just showing these, currently standing heads above the others racing to re-abjectify abstraction, Smith, Eichwald, Buthe, Sittg etc. etc.

See too: Zak Prekop at Shane Campbell , Aaron Curry at Michael Werner