Wednesday, January 3, 2018

The violence against faces.


(link)



"You can do incredible violence with a painting, with a stroke you can mutilate. The horror film and the painter implement similar meat. [...] Watch a body be melted, a face cleaved. A flower erupts a deformity or berries, it's difficult to tell, something the horror film cannot do: a painting's wayward stroke contains an ambiguity that is interpretable."
Full: Tomoo Gokita at Taka Ishii




"The body an artist can drop from a height over and over again and care nothing for it if they so wish. Cahn seems to care, even while suspending its pink people over the sandpaper caustics of its abrasive color, one of a very few painters to make painting's bright beauty a violent thing. and against people like rubbed erasers, pink and sensitive worn forms. Painting can do a real violence to balloons filled with red liquid." 
Full: Miriam Cahn at Meyer Riegger



Michaël Borremans at Dallas Museum of Art
"Like early scenes in horror films - prior first blood - The body is imparted the possibility of being threatened. If the trope of horror-films was to die after sex, it was because the carnality established the body as fragile, human, meat; sex filled the character with blood for the destruction to come. Similar to Borremans' realism positions the body capable of bodily "abstraction," the subtle wavering of flesh by a painter using brushstrokes to threaten hurt. Borremans painting loosens (abstracts) to threaten what could be done, coming apart with the fragile blow of a stroke. 
Full: Michaël Borremans at Dallas Museum of Art



"Like injection molded dolls to the grinder, like PVC fetishists inside too-hot cars, like your makeup running from tears or acid rain, disfigured, de-gloving Barbie's arms, Homer's shotgun bursting his wife's face in makeup gore: Tyson's melting figurines. The violence done by painters." 
-Nicola Tyson at Friedrich PetzelNicola Tyson at Nathalie Obadia



"its ambrosial sweetness balanced against subtle representational violence towards the women depicted, who in attaining this otherworldly ripeness bruise deformities... missing arms, noses, or butts swollen like egg sacs, breasts manipulated by invisible strings, contorted and culled to the desires of a culture, like everyone wondering whether Nicki's butt is real, or furry porn grown from Saturday cartoons given bodies like overinflated water-balloons, and subsections of violent pornography where the maternal is extracted and policed by the programmatic systems of capitalist production in bondage and milked called human cow -  there is a lot proving our cultural relation to maternal is at least a little fraught..." 
Full: Lisa Yuskavage at Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis



"...Madani's paintings foreground drawing of imagination from an abyss, that, like Bacon's claustro-realms, become spaces for enacting and enacted belittlements and torture, and what this means for Madani in psychoanalytic terms is hard to tell." 
Full: Tala Madani at David Kordansky