Tuesday, June 16, 2015

Günther Förg at Barbel Graesslin

Günther Förg at Barbel Graesslin
(link)

The eponymous "relief" of the exhibition comes from the work's insipid blankness as "fundamentally soothing to nervous system" - as David Foster Wallace once reasoned his recurrent reading of a particular column of Cosmo magazine - a subscription to the infantilizing soothe of a overloaded system proffered paralysis, a shutdown, the catatonic aphasia of Reality TV, celebrity tabloids, and now paintings, in which the real is replaced with its dummy version, relief from problems by a warm and swollen balloon replacement, the real replaced with a sex with an inflatable on Ambien, fundamentally soothing, just like these painting.