Adriana Lara at Algus Greenspon

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Not mere post-medium conditions - which remain converging into personal style's habitus - but post-identity: Artist's exhibitionist diaspora whose manufactured sign-confliction is its premise. Instead of objects pointing "towards" a content, it shows a network of objects whose sense lies in the uneasy relationships of its contents, the "signs that it employs."  A For-Hire stitching of an assemblage identity of its "employed": the "various sign systems as a kind of artistic material; letters, numbers, actors, brands, and cultures, are overlapped and overlaid as Lara creates her recombinant objects". The confounding of signs to be worn like badges toward identity subterfuge, fleeing identity, a new form of cool. Everybody's doing it:


 Goshka Macuga at Rüdiger Schöttle, Annette Kelm at Andrew Kreps, Darren Bader at Andrew Kreps,  Jana Euler at Kunsthalle Zurich, Kaspar Müller at Federico Vavassori

Dave Miko, Ned Vena, Antek Walczak at Algus Greenspon

You can see each’s each: Walzack’s hypertrophied-conceptual scribing, Vena’s noxious cold power plant contemporary and for whom both’s sterility is marginally eased by Miko’s cartoony claustrophobic hells.

It’s after all a Real Fine crowd, and predicts a fashionable futurity - reboot set designed for a future 2001 clockwork decor, updated in graffito’s newly neutered formalism, predicted. Tomorrow’s neo-liberal home trickled down to Ikea bourgeois - in the future. In the future this is what it’s all going to look like, you’re upper class highschooler’s bedroom, rendered here now in front of you. Well not really, its mostly just the toxic mindsets of contemporary painters, a theater stage that like all “futuristic” is just a hyperbole of the present.

Jesse Chapman at Algus Greenspon



Algus Greenspon’s ability to find strange painters is their gift, and moreover to put together the best shows by those aritsts. Old or youth, people that don’t fit into nice contemporaneity. Chapman might be a Schutz meets De Chirico mash-up, but conceptually they’re actually closer to Matthew Cerletty in their cerebral meta painting-plane winking; again the puzzle pieces adding up to mystery. These less game-board, but more narrative ennui, the strange decisions subtler, the guitar string fingers, and scabby shadow. It's almost content to just let the painting be paintings, but not totally. Whether these will be boring in 5 years or great is hard to tell, sometimes its just the relief of something not in lineage with cold minimalist graphic design.