These are nice (Iranian patterning meets cybernetic Guy Fieri Art Deco?) though wishes for the embedded content to be less burned images and more left to surface, but surely that just another means in a long tradition in finding representation for forbidden figuration?
See too: Sarah Morris at Berggruen
Cuteness is a gargoyle, the policing gremlins of Gothic architecture dispersed into media, into Pikachu, politically kneading your desire into acceptable dough. Cuteness creates artificial identification, forces sysmpathy, care, for an object its church. You become sympathetic to their cause, the militarized demons of the holy police state, Pikachu.
see too: Sam McKinniss at JTT, Misaki Kawai at The Hole, Sean Landers at Rodolphe Janssen
Past: Tony Cokes at Greene Naftali
"...but now text is aerosolized, language appears from all corners buzzing up from your hand to see newscasts across the continuum. An economy of speech value is recalculated on the ability to harvest attention. ... Cokes' read like poems of how text feels today, a glitchy attention deficit ... difficult to read but they command attention."
Full: Tony Cokes at Greene Naftali
Past: Camille Blatrix
"But tradition was wiped out by the invention of capitalist plastic. Labor was reduced to work, and craft became manufacturing processes, became laser cut wood, CNC milled blocks, a thousand interns on call. Suddenly your dreams could be injection molded. Ostensibly. "
"The cuteness of Hospital beds, which are ostensibly sympathetic to us. ... the look of object who wish to project their sympathetic nature to us humans."
Full: Sanya Kantarovsky & Camille Blatrix at Modern Art, Camille Blatrix at Wattis
"a sort of conceptual abstraction for your walls." Against our wishes for clean aluminum concepts and graspable truths, a "conceptual abstraction" is like having mud in your mind - an ungraspable muck, inside your head. And Euler's feel loose, threaten spillage, a filth inside. Do not open them up in here. It will get everywhere. I am not the cleaner, I cannot keep up with this level of dust. They watch you now. They will see you get it on you, your projection, a woman turning horse.
Past: Jill Mulleady
"Painting is its ghost - not so much has cultural baggage as is cultural baggage. A history paintings stir reflections on its surface. And you see something in it."
"... using your memory of history's painting against you. These paintings feel like being gaslit: isn't that what's his name in new colors? No, these are entirely new paintings. History flows through the bejeweled eye of the beholder's digestive endpoint, already chewed and expelled for us."
Jill Mulleady at Galerie Neu, Jill Mulleady at Gladstone Gallery
Surreal lush: plethorize association, fertilize until green abundance overflows, and we can't contain our reference. "It's risky, committing language to such ambiguousness, you sound like a perv while the tight-lipped get doubt's benefit. The words [will] assign more meaning to us than the sculptures which reflect them." The planet manifests unconscious what the spacemen would prefer closeted, our dead relations reappear. "We don't need other worlds. We need a mirror." - seems Lem's critique for conjured aliens. And between the poles of sentient-planet-surface-island-fantasy and mirror not sure where these lay. Somewhere like Matthew Barney chromed Louise Bourgeois.
See too: Ron Nagle at Modern Art, Nairy Baghramian at Museo Tamayo
"On the internet you would see items auto-designed by algorithms, the internet dredged of images to place it on a mug, Walmart printing an iPhone case with a man in diapers. Everything onto everything. Vertigo in feeling one's toes sense the full ocean of production. A tornado of reference and attachment, and the audience attempting to see in the whirl anything to relieve the anxiety of so much garbage. "
PR: "consciously creates unprecedented combinations of form without guaranteeing that they will resemble anything at all in our ordinary, sinful world or even in the otherworldly realm of pure form."
PR: "this visual detritus would be found laying in wait for redemption as aureoles of broken fate."
"Hoarding as a sort of extended compassion for the derelict neglected of culture, a sympathy moving to material a world simply would like to rid itself of. Composing it into art objects becomes a blessing for sending the objects into the "heavenly" afterlife ... Hooking the hose from the expelling parts of our cultural body to the part that feeds, [ass to head.]"
See too: Darren Bader at Andrew Kreps, Ser Serpas at LUMA Westbau
Past: Sam Pulitzer
"... as images become devalued the importance of artists to revalue the image as puzzling indeterminable founts, labyrinthian puzzles, to stopgap their expediency, becomes paramount."
Sam Pulitzer at Real Fine Arts, Peter Wächtler & Sam Pulitzer at House of Gaga and Reena Spaulings Fine Art
(link)
"a whole fun fair" : the big cartoon, the toy store, thematic to our world which converts everything into transactable pleasure, the stores for adults not much different from a kid's store anymore. "Sesame Street and hyper-Western Americanisation, which Richter has internalised since childhood." In 2015 CAWD wrote: "the kids grown on cartoons have arrived and their childhoods have coincidentally, absurdly, become the accurate depictions of the way the world has begun to feel." And we're once again asked to read the malls for clues to our own humanity. We window shop for it, humanness or something like it.
See too: “Puddle, pothole, portal” at Sculpture Center, Juliana Huxtable at Reena Spaulings
the difference between here and Robert Nava or Joe Bradley for the real nappies. Painting as a child, or representations of the paintings of children. One is defensible, wields emoji badges of draftsman. The other is a child. Your preference will be telling. Some will say, neither, yuk yuk. But elsewhere, always, day to day, the same choice.
See too: Austin Lee at Peres Projects (evolution of bad painting)
Painting today is made to hang well behind desks. Blame Gerhard Richter "powerful" benign abstraction. Safe. The beautiful paintings Cahn's can't really be mistaken for. Color instead a cruelty. Chicken plucked flesh. An acid replacing lipstick. There is too much content, unmistakeable, with an ambiguous antagonist. Is that birth going well? is the smiley faced sex? The general moments of happiness (sex, handjobs, infants) instead unsafe. This all sounds so direly over-the-top, so excessive. But maybe that's why it works. There's no couching it. No excuse to hang well over you.
Lmao this press release is pretty good, if even only for the last line: "What is compelling here is not a proposal that these assemblages are meaningful, but that there is a chance they could be." The line is telling, much to unpack. The anxiety of things. Of their meaning. A real terror.
Xu Zhen is the guy that cut a meter off the top of Mt. Everest, showed the still-snowcapped-peak in a vitrine. Documentation to "prove" it. At the time I was interested in myth and the production of the artist - the way rumor rutted into reality, how artists became "mythic," their trademark. Now it's XU ZHEN®. What artist hasn't established a brand, released a perfume. Like the paintings - structured on the WeChat message screen - familiarity provides comfort. Comfort sells. Place your identity into a package, into an Apple store, something more easily consumable.