Please support Contemporary Art Writing Daily this year! You can donate here or if you’re an artist or art space, you can help the Library grow by donating for past writing, which is also here.

Luz Carabaño at Hoffman Donahue

(link)

You know how the gentle but complex shapes in worn pastels of used bars of soap are kind of always beautiful? Well imagine those shapes on your porcelain white, you looking down into them, and there a kind of seeing pool, a bar of soap screening faded and out-of-focus vintage film reels. Things you remember and fuzzy. Yeah kinda like that. Your ability to believe in this will mark your reception to. They are but soap, and that's important. 

Jiang Cheng at Tara Downs

(link)

The 19th century's joke was painting faces positioned next to flowers and 20th century's joke was painting a face like it was flowers. Now what? A face is just the putty we rearrange in hopes of arranging something like meaning. An endless mine to profit from, our faces. Something we can pump. We're inordinately cruel to ourselves.

You can paint a face like a sunset. It will let you. Rearrange eyes, nose, mouth - a surgeon from hell, Picasso. Tyrannically bend people for aesthetics. These seem somehow more tender. Maybe its the close cropping, which take serious the surface, flesh, rather than rearranging a Mr. Potato Head. (Deleuze famously remarking that Bacon didn't paint faces but heads, meat.) Maybe it's this painting a face, painting it like a Monet, a low-irony too-serious painting for today, implying a minimum of self care. Artists finally part of the beauty industry, these look like it. Who doesn't want to look like a water lily?