Alex Hubbard at Regen Projects

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More and more it's become important that images are "striking." They look powerful on walls or bus stops. Big colorful bonanzas about an inch deep. This is the language of advertising. Painting, it turns out, is the advertisement that advertises itself. Self-advertisement in painting. It's what artists are becoming wise to. You could strap any tagline from Coca-Cola onto these paintings and it would make sense. It's just now the product name is scrawled on the back. Big dumb abstractions sell for more.  For a more complicated take on this transactional form of visual language look at Charlene von Heyl.

(Also, I thought we put a pause on the "process based abstraction" thing after the whole stumbling in search of brains thing?)


See too: Alex Hubbard at House of Gaga (1), Alex Hubbard at House of Gaga (2), Charline von Heyl at Petzel & Deichtorhallen, Charline von Heyl at Gisela Capitain, Charline von Heyl at Capitain Petzel

Alex Hubbard at House of Gaga

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Jury-rigging some Wonkanian projectors has a certain pleasant inanity lacking in all the resined and painted squares flaunting their inanity as tokens of what is funding these here. The projector proves its function, you see it working, satisfying some libidinal candy impulse, however inane, like watching candy be made, loving the byzantine contraption that creates it, implying some warmth, that the machine cares, however little it does.


See too: Isabelle Cornaro at Museum Leuven, Nora Schultz at dépendance, Oscar Tuazon at Le Consortium & Paradise Garage,

Alex Hubbard at House of Gaga

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The move from perspectively delirious videos recording their own production - a sort of Genzkenian prolepsis of claiming the production the product - and acclaimed then before into the recent and ongoing big wet&sticky Jolly-Ranchers whose vestigial remains of the viewpointally ambiguous videos is their most interesting, albeit liminally, part; that Hubbard continues regressing into now actual figurative representations of the ambiguity and masking a drinking problem (there's a bar behind the paintings!) thematizing the boozie distress of authorship, the eyerolling tragedy of those painters drunk to death, and perhaps signals Hubbard has staged his own intervention and we can move soberly on.


See too: KAYA at Deborah Schamoni, Isa Genzken at David Zwirner, Isa Genzken at Institute of Contemporary Art