John Giorno at Almine Rech

(link)

Words given oomph, pain, the racket of advertising on poem phrases, hijacking your attention less as an ad than a koan-like image, "chrysanthemum and skulls," in graphic megaphone. "Lots of artists like to put phrases on signs, do it in a similar way. A particularly satisfying gesture: language, propelled with advertorial oomph, instead deadpans with its empty cymbal crash; understand the words but, devoid of context feel a little haunted, disembodied, ghosts of something far."  The generalized airiness of poety instead at 11. Shouting a phrase that echoes empty in your head. It's nicer to have strange image ringing in your ears than some ad slogan selling weiners in a jingle. Less the ideology of LIVE LAUGH LOVE and more the crush of screaming listless image.

see too: Matt Keegan, Kay Rosen at Grazer Kunstverein, Hanne Lippard & Nora Turato at Metro Pictures, Gene Beery at Shoot the Lobster, Karl Holmqvist at Sant’Andrea de Scaphis,

Antoni Tàpies at Almine Rech

(link)

Precursor to some of the worst excesses of paint as expressionist mudphilia and painting as the scatalogic napies of men - say Anselm Keifer or Schnabel - you can see primordial the later male existential angst that would encrust itself so thick in history, ego. These are the late paintings of Tapies, after all that, painting in the ruins of it.

Jason Fox at Almine Rech

(link)

While the imagery has been blunted over the years the psychedelia remains, the optical tricks of overlay and transposition:

"The near-holographic parallax induced by its ever-shifting appearance returns one again and again to the provocation of the content-specific conceit and to its function as a perceptual heuristic. Like the famous gestalt of the duck and rabbit, these portraits were mutually exclusive, such that in order to see one, you had to forget the other. And this is to say nothing of their sites of slippage between representation and abstraction, where, in tandem, they altogether fell away." -S. Hudson

But you should sift though Fox's semi-thorough website for the weirder stuff, the more liquid stuff, find the paintings on sleeping bags that look Berlin Biennial today and made 20 years before.  The baroque form of objects, mocking the minimalist mantra that things "are what they are," because sometimes they are too much, they trick us, have a presence that exudes something that we can't hold at a remove, they are sticky to us, even inside us.

Genieve Figgis at Almine Rech

Gingeras's assertion of Figgis's Irish "'blarney'" as the distinguishing figurative characteristic perhaps referring to the loquaciousness of the paint, its liquidity like lubricant tongue, drunk and slurring. Unlike Tyson or Madani, the meta paint function isn't to literalize what it depicts but instead a pure painterly smooth talking. Forcing upon the viewer too much of they had believed they wanted, paint. You ever eaten melted ice cream? It's whatever is beyond indulgent, saccharine.



See too: Nicola Tyson at Friedrich Petzel, Tala Madani at David Kordansky