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Monday, June 9, 2025

Oliver Osborne at Francis Irv

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Osborne doubling down on his matte representation, its dry scumbled until dusty. Yellow paint like grandma's, you need a Claritin for it. "[Richard] Prince's real joke is that the paintings keep telling the same joke for years and years stupidly." Our most famous sans-comedy. Repetition, run into the ground begets something else. A non. A fading. Dry humor to dust. Reboots? Maybe just lovely dust. A new nostalgia.

See too: "Artisanal Old-timey rendering, wrapping its cold surface in warm wool."

Sunday, June 8, 2025

Nina Porter at Theta


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The mad scientist is driven to the fringes to invent something "against god." A monster. To surreptitiously photograph girls by the pool Tichý built a camera out of matchbooks and thread spools. An isolationist spy for his own perversion. A mad scientist's sympathetic intentions, desire, even if their methods are not. You can't take people's parts without asking. The doctor would have required permission from the health department for all that exhumation. That's why you need to build a suspicious backpack. To have a reason for all that gadgetry. Build a peephole into the lab. The voyeured corpse stolen from Étant donnés.

Wednesday, June 4, 2025

Kobby Adi at FELIX GAUDLITZ


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Conceptual art mutated into three genres, 1, zombie abstraction; 2, art legalese, say Cameron Rowland or Daren Bader/Martin Creed; and 3, myth attractors. The myth attractors best illustrated by Trisha Donnelly for whom stories circulate as much as image. But a definition might be provided by this description of Adi: "an idea extending beyond any material work, disseminated by hitching rides on the memories of those who have seen it, on the words of those who talk about it, or within the images and accounts that document, or merely suggest, its existence. Still, the label is not the artwork. Wherever there’s water, All splashing and pouring can appear—that’s the point." While Donnelly has gone on to arguably more formal work, the setup remains, this air of suggestibility, the ominous object whose explanatory reference points are cut at some specific level, until reference begin pointing everywhere, until the air becomes perfumed with it. The gap is the mystery, is its interpretability. These are instruments made of gut string inside heat resistant tubing, which, like the internal temperature of animals, you can hear the music already. It exists in the suspicion for it. Reminiscent of Michael E. Smith's clarinets inside PVC tubes - documentation of which seems vaporized along with Susan Hillbery's gallery and website. It's just myth now. But they sounded great.


Tuesday, June 3, 2025

David Douard at Galerie Chantal Crousel


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in comparison to the raw sewage spilling onto gallery floors today ( see: aspirated trash ), this seems from a moment ago, when we would arabesque our garbage, assemblage a baroque. Our Ornaments of trash. Douard's look like Matisse at this point. Maybe the water we swim is so full of waste that's its just water at this point. Simply the material we sculpt with now. Valerie Keane, Robert Bittenbender, but really it's all Genzken's fault. 

See too: 

Sunday, June 1, 2025

Kayode Ojo at Maureen Paley


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2006? Carol Bove, Martin Boyce, Patrick Hill, Michaela Meise, et al. VVork-core. "All the chatter about a 'new formalism' going on." It was our "Fuck the Bauhaus" moment. They're all in Artforum several times. Everyone was repackaging, recompositionalizing, a minimalist modernism. Presenting tableaus of a wonkified high culture past, like bent Ikea showrooms of minimalism. Now it is a micro-era, quickly forgotten. But the procedures remain fun, merchant stands for selling something back to ourselves.