Marlene Dumas at Zeno X

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The watermelon in the metaphor is that essence "painting" - that unconscious object, myth, we all have some benign feelings towards, painting. And Dumas provides illustration: got famous for theatricalizing its juice struggling against the container, composition, corral.


see yesterday: Julie Beaufils at Balice Hertling

François Curlet at Micheline Szwajcer

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Darren Bader, Bertrand Lavier, Baldesarri, Martin Creed, Mungo Thompson, François Curlet. Not quite pop art, not quite conceptual art, derived from each, a cartoon of both.

Daan van Golden at Micheline Szwajcer

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Wasn't the promise of van Golden's some eternal nubility, a candy whose wrapper never left it.
A sort of perenniality. Old paintings that don't look it. van Golden died in 2017, but paintings fresh. Wasn't that the promise of art. You physically cannot remove the wrapper.

Ann Veronica Janssens at Micheline Szwajcer

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Art may be stupid, but the universe might be worse: arbitrary. Occasionally things click and the world briefly goes dark. A universe at large enough scales like clockwork. That we view through lenses wet with glass. The phenomenological that seems an attempt to reason with meat watching these big careful clocks.


Ann Veronica Janssens at Bortolomi, Ann Veronica Janssens at Micheline Szwajcer

Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven at M HKA

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CAD a disservice to artists whose exhibitions come to look like amassed icons floating in the etherous white of networks we scroll through, aggravating the cognitive fatigue of diaspora, ending in images as hyperlinks we cannot click or know. En abyme we fall into the fatigue of image consumption, the documentation illustrating the pages we scroll through.  If much of 2010s art succeeded on its ability to alleviate symptoms of screen fatigue by presenting walls of neutrality's palliative, or meme-like jewels for spread, see Sanchez et al., then the big exhibition's ostensible generosity and vanity becomes its disadvantage.

Joëlle Tuerlinckx at LLS Paleis

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"We know the sky’s blueness even before we know it as “blue”, let alone as “sky.” as Robert Irwin paraphrased, may actually not be true. Art's belief in the unfiltered experience, its underwriter, in that raw sight's could overcome cultural bias to see the thing itself but one of the scarier aspects of where cognitive science seems to be toeing is that raw experience is rife with blindspots to the point of collapse held to together by our cognitive structures we believed as fault, that sky is actually possibly culturally blue. Whatever. There's no truth here, just the carnival of experience, fun house made from the funhouse glass of cultural knowing, the warbled mirror of art's stuttering experience. "Having in this way blurred the borders between space and work, the unprepared visitor may at first not notice the work. Because in the world of Joëlle Tuerlinckx, anything can be exhibited."

Michael E. Smith at 500 Capp Street Foundation, Darren Bader at Sadie Coles

Mark Manders at Zeno X

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There isn't a Manders sculpture that doesn't use an instance as a permanent fixture.  This stasis, like a pause, blurs sculpture as its image, blur their bronze eternality with the fresh moment they inhabit. A moment replaced with its object. To be both an object and its ossification, the chair is still a chair even if its a sculpture of it, and bronze dogs are sculptures well as depictions of them, these odd points of superpostion between their difference that makes the world uncanny, reduced 88%, like all the various fives in the world still representing the other. Its a subtle thing treating the world as an image, masking the violence of our treatment of it as such.

Michael Van den Abeele at Trampoline

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Unable to read the word "dandyism" in a press release without experiencing some mild form of post-trauma stress flashing back to 2008 and being force-fed Krebber and all the fall-out from that, of artists with loose brushes and inflated press releases excusing over-cooked noodles in place of paintings, making this like a really badly timed joke, a reappearance of a ghost of a past anguish wafting back undead and dancing with a shimmy to rub it back in our faces, we should replace the word Dandy with obnoxiously leisure class. 

Jan Fabre at M HKA

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If no longer a style, your common Artworld artist is intended to develop something distinguishing their career from others that look just like it, a sort of personal subjective measure called "sensibility," whereas Fabre has none. Fabre will do anything. If there is a sensibility it is something closer to Hollywood rendition of zaniness, the "working man" using all the tricks in the books to close in on some idea of what ostensibly wacky artists do opposed to the tasteful remove come to prominence from the artworld for artists and typified by the CAD roster international style. But, Fabre's over-plethora of identifiers, its wackiness, rather than achieving some profoundly great outsider status, paradoxically ends up looking like the art that underpins its different means, modes as mannequins dressed up differently to look different but the same. Its foreboding omen to all the young artists today engaging in this sort of cultural performativity, iconized by the last New Museum Triennial, in which artists seemingly engaged in some escape from art to culture, possibly aren't really at all. 

See too: Venice Biennale vs  New Museum Triennial