Claire Fontaine at Air de Paris

(link)

The art equivalent of a Live Laugh Love poster. When you point this out they say yes that's the point. But it's a shitty point. Do collectors know they're buying fake art? Or does it not matter anymore. Shitty art self-naturalizes on the walls long enough. The artist is on strike, that's why the art is bad, it would be neoliberal to care. 

Emma McIntyre at Air de Paris

(link)

Amazing how far we've come. 10 years ago Josh Smith was ironically fucking himself on canvas, Joe Bradley's neanderthal nappies were thought the bedrock of low, stoopid fun. Kerstin Brätsch's fake import/export DAS INSTITÜT. But the ironizing of the sign only serves the delivery of what we really wanted: big juice, canvas, double gulp size. Irony allowed for cake and its excuse too: this was sugar free painting, a critique or whatever. But "the sign will always triumph through the screen of an ironic signifier." And eventually someone realized they didn't need a delivery vehicle for cake. And so now today here have it, full blown painting Tang.

Jef Geys at Air de Paris

(link)

Images-forms which are shown in a certain way, i.e. in a studied “correct” way, under “correct” guidance, embedded in a “correct” strategy, are readily accepted, as if they have existed all the time. Repetition, while creating habit, nearly at the same time leaves a taste of déjà vu. The end is an accepted boredom. Images-forms, no matter how strong they are, may appear perfectly normal, submitted, tame, having reached the saturation point. The images are experienced as something “retinal,” which is also the experience one is looking for: the significance underneath is kept at a distance. We are inclined to dispose of any images which cannot be used to finish our homework, as mere scenery for more important things that we supposedly have on our mind. To demonstrate this obvious wearing out of images, I started looking for basic forms with a very simple structure but a heavily loaded content. 

If Geys' work is confusing, ever shifting, it is because it voids itself of the general markers that usually demarcate its sense/use/meaning.  Geys' don't necessarily ordain a use, something "used to finish our homework" but instead images which flight in and out of an ability to read them for information. A language we are not necessarily tasked with translating but ascertaining whether meaning at all. 

See too: Guy de Cointet at Museum Leuven

Tom Allen at Air de Paris

(link)

...more Berghain than cottagecore - to paraphrase the press release. The pleasure here seems in twisting the dial to the humming point between saccharine pleasure and spoiled overripeness - between day and night - a painting your mother "likes" with uncertainty. Allen seems to find pleasure in this sweet spot hum.

Tastes change however, but let these be a marker of 2020s - that this was the edge, the waver between sickness and wealth. Painting as stakes planted, this was the limit. So if you start to love these, see how far we've moved.

See too: Tom Allen at Lulu

Eliza Douglas at Air de Paris

(link)

Paint becomes simply the candied shell to painting's cultural myth. Doesn't matter how thin because it's merely the container/shape of our love for "painting." As thin as marginally abstracted t-shirts. Drawing ripples in surface to activate the beneath, tap the vast depths of painting's cultural wealth, this the watermelon.


Previously: (1)Julie Beaufils at Balice Hertling, (2)Marlene Dumas at Zeno X, (3)Svenja Deininger at Collezione Maramotti
See too: Eliza Douglas at Overduin & Co.

Torbjørn Rødland at Air de Paris

(link)

Photographers and fetish-film directors alike foster specific affinities, the subdivisions of taste and sensitivities, high heel egg crush for instance expanding out of your basic foot fetish, of which they develop film and thus genres of. Doing violence to celebrities, torture porn, neoteny, whatever heats your iron in the "Layers upon layers of perception and identification." Our sensitivity to art, seems a sensitivity to objects, not much different from fetish.


see too: Chadwick Rantanen at Essex Street, Lucy Skaer at MRAC, CAWD on Fetish

Bruno Serralongue at Air de Paris

(link)

A good photo should tell us something is the sort of mantra of photojournalism that edges and delineates its propagandistic subconscious.  Which Serralongue avoids by making not good photos. "offer little esthetic enjoyment" "all "studium" and no "punctum." "The images supply content, description and information, but rarely a piercing moment; the viewer is not "grabbed" by the image, nor seduced by one captivating element. Rather than feed us answers, the images make us do the work of analysis."  The blood-draining banalization of photography like switching the electricity illuminating the carnival rush off. No circus just moral bread. Taken this way, their depletion, looking like husks, becomes its own odd rush, realizing just how close photos once were to the high of entertainment, now the pleasure of withholding it.



See too:A.L. Steiner at Koenig & Clinton

Sturtevant at Air de Paris

(link)

Literalness in Sturtevant's work is always a sword's doubled edge, a trap  - that many fell into seen in early writing on the artist - literalness was staged obviousness acting as a foreground which blinded with its hamfistedness. The dark thing next to the bright light. Often this blinding was to hide a negation, the hole of the duplicate, Baudrillard speaking about the Twin Towers: "The fact that there were two of them signifies the end of any original reference. [...] Only the doubling of the sign truly puts an end to what it designates," never concludes the thought, leaving a question of what happens to a sign that no longer designates, leaving a void. Repetition's semantic satiation feels like what exactly? Does what exactly?
To take Sturtevant literally here, constructing the idea that she wants to "KILL STUPIDITY" where the wallpaper is her declarative and the duplicated video exemplar of stupidity is a trap. The advertisement isn't stupid. What the video does is assimilate a contradiction so well as to negate any distinction between its words, between smart and stupid, to basically make it unthinkable, elegantly producing a negation, a blindspot, what Sturtevant had been predicting for years.


See too: Sturtevant at MoMA, Sturtevant at Thaddaeus Ropac, Mark Leckey at Haus Der Kunst + Kunsthalle Basel

Magnus Andersen at Neue Alte Brücke & Dorothy Iannone at Air de Paris

It's impossible to measure earnestness. Time de-ironizes and jest is made serious by attention. Saying one is more authentic, or by comparing hierarchically these two is a set-up for defeat. You could say (with a long enough timeline) "the necessities of circumstance turn to virtue." Andersen knows that to survive is to triumph. And so with defeat you must accept its march into visibility. Andersen even got a theme-song for his parade. You can like one more than the other, but you can't say no to it, and like Darren Bader, the one willing to destroy something is the one who controls it, to paraphrase Dune. Thus Andersen straps a bomb to his chest walks into the vault of images, which we his visual hostages, on a long enough timeline, learn to love, and pied man leading children to their deaths.


See too: Darren Bader at Kölnischer Kunstverein, Dorothy Iannone at Peres Projects, Group Show at Neue Alte Brücke

Trisha Donnelly at Air de Paris

(link)

Donnelly’s cultivation of myth, generator of legends, in her information’s stipulated lacking of documentation, PR, mutates quickly in time into boring myth, into anecdotes retold to oblivion: of a white horse and “Napoleonic garb,” mythic meme of which no photos exists, now documented as a blank white page on Kaplan’s website, or the ancient Buick with California plates unceremoniously parked in a Minnesota museum’s underground parking garage as gift to it, ultimately unaccepted as a work into its collection, a mistake if there ever was one, and shipped back to her, a Buick. Viewed from above the expanse of projects seems a willfully obscure self-promotional package (omens) of the artist as mythos but does nothing to dull the strange specificity of the individual objects themselves, which in documentation seem constructed to reveal less than nothing, the chimes muted.
But the silence which Donnelly surrounds her objects broken by two stellar MoMA talks, one on the 11th prismatic - a broken poem to make every Berlin press release cry - the other expounding her interest in objects curated, quickly showing her infatuation with objects more than posturing cool, but an ability to draw the otherworldly manner of objects into the world, even assigning Robert Rosenblum’s voice a color.

See too : Florian Hecker & John McCracken at Künstlerhaus KM-

Edit: It was Robert Rosenblum, not Harold Rosenburg...

Lily van der Stokker at Air de Paris



The cute design abutting flat footed niceties. That despite greeting cards insistence of overflowing sentimentality, van der Stokker’s skepticism over the clean pre-packaged prose instead inserts the more human version of awkward phrasing, misguided explanations and childish self-congratulation. ...often comes across as defeatist, or sad, at best when depicting something human. At its worst when appearing a simple detournment of Starbuck’s design; a Suessification of cutery, a sort of arty adbusters anti-advert.