David Benjamin Sherry at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery

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From the success af Klint on shopping bags to the dredging styles of the Santa Fe transcendentalists - there's something in the air wanting spirit. But you can't mention god in a press release. (The word spirituality was only recently allowed back in the gates.) So the landscape is a neutral country, a naturalism speaking to god with alibi of the secular. But we want belief in more. A common side effect of nervous time. We want the landscape rendered as spectral presence, to see safety in the sharp corners of the world commanded hazard-yellow by higher powers. Now beg for the higher powers Polke once provided.  

Emma Reyes at Crèvecoeur

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The point is, give your inkblot a shape. Let the shape sweat out something to be seen. Not to interminably serialize a single spilled question mark. There is something to be seen here. In the sweating flesh of a tomato jacuzzi. We don't know what it is but it is to be seen.

See too: inkblot

Dean Sameshima at Good or Trash

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"Anonymous" spinning a literary riff on the signifier/signified. The homosexual is undepicted, they are of course anonymous. The label points to but not any particular one. But the anonymous label moves us away from the description and toward its potential depicted as a question already presupposed. Who is the homosexual? What happened on Kawara's date? Who is CAWD? This rupture in the signifier/-fied is the imaginative potential. This is the poetic, the nostalgia. A promised object in losing, already lost. The double stamp on the homosexual as "anonymous" dooms them - you will not receive them back, they are lost to time.

Matti Braun at BQ

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What you thought were some lovely glass is instead a cruel deployment of cultural signifiers. Report to the text for your education. The big reveal, the pleasance is actually "meaning."  

 

Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork at Empty Gallery

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Art is the airline hanger where we assess the fallen debris of culture - let the objects, set to dance by artists, "speak." We initiates perform the ancient practice of meaning. Divine from cultural tea leaves a wall text, a press release, a content. The use-value of art, meaning, the world is not arbitrary, there are things in the dark trees, we cannot see them but assume them, look until your eyes produce them.

See too: Airline Wreckage

Matthieu Palud at Les Bains-Douches

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Paintings intentionally underwhelmed. Just whelmed. Which you can be in Europe. It's hard to be this artless. Which Palud - stylistically a Cheshire cat - has been playing at a while. Against the neon stylings of today - dull light is relief. Apple and water for your hangover. Even the doorways of Hammershøi and churchlight of Zurbaran are too much. 

Adam Alessi at Hoffman Donahue

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There's a threshold where horror and style cross into something.. else. Tim Burton perhaps, where an arabesque cutesery becomes its own grotesque. A clam corpse flaired like a theater-kid. A fedora perhaps. Resident Evil's victorian mommy. Hard to pinpoint what is so off putting about Tim Burton, but so blockbuster to some. If painters are going to treat the body as some compositional putty to dislocate hips for painterly whims.. at least admitting the horror to the manipulation seems earnest - if manneristly unnecessary.