Elliott Jamal Robbins at Kai Matsumiya

(link)

Not quite drawing, nor painting, nor animation. Not quite Kentridge or Madani or Churchman's Painting Treatments. More Guston's heads. But messier. More nebulous. A tough position when we demand art be "about something;" want the museum jewel of didacticism - or the troll of question's eyerollingly forever. But these happily float in goo and blood and guts. It's more Pope.L writing jokes without punchlines, the unease in letting an audience hang. Be with themselves over this mess. Sketches without objects, just sketches, which are real ideas. "A drawing does what so much art must artificially prevent - its exhaustion. A drawing is only an idea, a scratch pad for the realized candy. The drawing is instructions for a creation inside your head. What SFX and kunsthalle budgets can concretize will never match the monster hiding in the closet of your mind."

See too: "If laughter was the earthquake alleviating the tension of the joke, then Pope.L's don't really relief its valve. A refusal that turns humor into a weapon where misunderstanding the joke might have risks. "White Peo abstr ation." Pointed fingers. What are the stakes of misunderstanding? The generalized artworld fear of misinterpretation becomes conflated with the generalized fear of Blackness, of one's foot in one's mouth, of white spaces suddenly filled with an innuendo that doesn't confine itself to safe quotational space of art..."