Emanuel Seitz at Christine Mayer & Tess Jaray at Secession

(Christian Mayer, Secession)

Painting becomes an organization system for color. For "painting". Which then work backwards to find the logic, organization system. Which is something like meaning. 

Lawrence Abu Hamdan at Secession

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It's days like this when you realize you are just looking at promotional vehicles, you haven't left the house in days, the world being advertised to you.  There's no content here, just a dark room for your projection of how interesting this could be. The advertisement.

Frida Orupabo at KOENIG2 by_robbygreif

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Better than most instagrams curating an [a e s t h e t i c] - Orupabo's @nemiepeba seems actually haunted, everything pulled from lead or poisoned. The trend for a "cursed aesthetic" usually provides the relief of first world absurdity - Wonderbread loaves smeared Crest toothpaste, at the bottom of a pool - allowing both the balm of capitalist recognition and absurdity. Orupabo's curse, lacking the palliative of small humor, instead threatens misrecognition and loss (the subjects always on that cusp of being blown out, periphery, but most importantly frozen - almost embalmed) and the relief valve long lost. Which feels like true curse, hints at the actual possibility of a curse carried.

The difficulty of transferring the accumulative/sifting force of Instagram to a gallery is obvious, and Orupabo's seem like attempts at a medical and forensics means to make something of them.

This seems less an exorcism than an attempt to wire the instagram force of the punctum into the extended life of the studium. To ask us to do something with these images that while affective we pass through with an ease. Into the ashes we pretend is "history." There's something Frankensteinian about it, electrifying it to dance over and over, not allowing to pass into death. Make it do it again. Make it haunt. 

Daniel Knorr at Galerie nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder

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Specimens of the world, color, art. "...resemble the little pieces of the Berlin Wall often sold as souvenirs." Torn from the it, placed on walls. Vivisecting our still respiring world - slicing it apart to begin the coroner's report. Art as a form of playing doctor, pretend this is real make believe, the fantasy of anything but a big dead beautiful rock.

Yong Xiang Li at Emanuel Layr

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The returns of overt sentimentality chimes with our nostalgic times, its longing, wistfulness, or its hate filled "again." Building apparatus to suspend this ephemeral world: a wallpaper's pleasance like a tissue against fire. 

Erwin Gross, Ross Bleckner at Bernd Kugler

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Omg these photos. You would think - with the recent rise of an embodied abstraction - Bleckner would primed for some type of resurgence, but then you're reminded with photos like this, and a nytimes headline or two will fill you in on the rest, Bleckner never really desurged, just one of the big painters quietly filling rooms like this. Where little bit of taste becomes a deluge of it. Gross's paintings looking like flowers in a trash bin nicely better at annealing the heat.

Jongsuk Yoon at Galerie nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder

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Turning Frankenthaler into the cotton candy it's become for collectors, what was latent become libidinal. Stirring the surface into a delightfully consumable substance.

Nazim Ünal Yilmaz at Exile

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A lot of painting functions by tensioning the relationship between painting and its cultural myth  - think the Neanderthalism of Joe Bradley, Krebber, or conceptually negated Sturtevant, the printer of Guyton, the signature of Josh Smith, the bruising history of von Wulffen, necrotics of Richter, the fordist production lines of Koons, Craven, Murakami, Kaws. Etc. Neurotic affairs with "painting." But occasionally painting succeeds by making us forget the relation to its myth, succeeds as a painting without history, paints something else and Painting we get to forget about.


previously: (1)Julie Beaufils at Balice Hertling, (2)Marlene Dumas at Zeno X, (3)Svenja Deininger at Collezione Maramotti, (4)Eliza Douglas at Air de Paris

Melanie Ebenhoch at Martin Janda

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 no longer peering through neutral surfaces, a certain complicity in looking through. Ignoring, or looking past something, it isn't innocent.

Soshiro Matsubara at Croy Nielsen

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Unlike Khnopff's Caresses there's no nuzzling here and there is something decidedly unerotic about all of Matsubara's. Nothing really sexy about disjointed mannequins which like the scratchy paint conjure all the rugburn the recumbent will endure. Like Lutz Bacher oversized sexual assault doll, or Charles Ray's endlessly genitaliad figures, there's something about mannequin sex that doesn't sit right. Like a kiss without wet, like paintings scratched at, there's something sorta dehumanized about it, more like fish kissing or gasping. Highlighting the strange butt that looks more like a shelf.

Roman Signer at Martin Janda

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What is with the Swiss? Jean Tinguely, Signer, Fischli&Weiss... the list goes on. Mechanics and a comedy denied, like claiming you didn't fart, that the sculptures aren't inane, ridiculous with a straight face. You see it later inflated in the steroided dumbness of Rondinone or Urs Fischer. It finds interest in the discovery that you can steroid stupidity. That people will enjoy it, stacking colored shit into the air.


See too: Urs Fischer at JTT

Julia Haller at Meyer Kainer

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The elusive hunt for more gestures, more brushes, textures, styles. Hijacking the doodles, graffiti, adolescent scratchpads, the painter explores. Different brushes signal something different. This tautology is not nearly a problem. They start to scratch at what we crave: not looking like art. Because art is mannered, stillborn, cliche. Looking like something else would require a thought, and not an interminable hall of mirrors.

Tanja Widmann at FELIX GAUDLITZ

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The decontextualized image, packed in into a perspex box and sent back through the internet. Perspex to prevent it from becoming just an image again, so that it will always contain the frame, aura, of having once been real, not just any image. One with a halo and a tomb.

Albert Mertz at Croy Nielsen

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Variations and permutations of style are the most bludgeoningly tiresome aspects of contemporary art; artists implanting their "subject" in mass produced canvases, themselves into little Fordist factories, producing the worst thing an artist can, a "series." Some finding "criticality" in an ironic exhaustion like Josh Smith or Ann Craven. Then the whole zombie painting deal. It leaves us exhausted for an artist like Mertz. It becomes hard to articulate a difference without rimshoting around some basket of the "authentic." Though he was before all that.

Birke Gorm at Croy Nielsen

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Materialize has become a word of extra meaning in art, a new process akin to electroplating, anodizing, or gilding. Artists "materialize" things like text into substance, into a material with weight, turd like figures, objects which feel material. Distinct from artistic objectification (which merely turns the virtual into the concrete to make it transactable), materialization is the patina of objectification, an excess. As if the content was inherent to the material object itself, as if it speaks.


see too: Materialphilia, Birke Gorm at Croy Nielsen (1)

Nicolas Ceccaldi at Meyer Kainer

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Joker was happy to stick the multiple prongs of its fork into multiple political hot sockets and see sparks. For reasons seemingly not much more than to see those sparks; political hot buttons becoming their own form of Hollywood special effects. The film's patheticness against its grand ambitions seems to mirror the main characters own, a sort of filmic meta-pathos. Identifying not with the joker, but the losers who paint pictures of the joker.

"becomes impossible to imagine an identity outside of cultural signs."


Read all posts tagged Nicolas Ceccaldi

Tala Madani at secession

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The sketchbook is the imagination's stage, so whatever wet sketches happen in Madani's abyssal paintings already makes sense, they are theaters for whatever projection is put in it. It's a sort of brilliant trick, capable of making them accept whatever, a stick figure becomes the thought/action of conjuring it, thinking it. The painting is the sketchbook drawing from the unconscious onto the theater - which is the virtual projection inside your skull - that is, again, the painting. Projected thought*. When Madani's brush smears shit it bears the shiver of actual, not because it is, but because it feels someone imagine doing it. Reading a story of a murder feels somehow less horrible than finding, even a fictional, scrawled notebook saying how they would murder. Watching someone imagine. The paint - which painting professors will be quick to remind you is just fancy dirt suspended in fats - equates to shit, or cake, or flesh. Light is sprayed like urine. Children bear the face of men, bear the brunt of Madani. Which seem, unsafe for art, being this literal. It is becoming more and more important to be dumb in art.

*So of course they became movies, they basically already were.


See too: Quintessa Matranga at Freddy, Read all posts tagged Tala Madani

Helmut Federle at Galerie nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder

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It seems artworld is hard to parody well since most depictions aren't particularly comedic or even apt. (e.g. the opening's tray of grapes that marks the most naive scenes.)  If not just wrong, the worse blunder is attempting a cartoon satire; it's far better to leave the the depiction dry, unchanged, art parodies itself. I mean the artworld actually has a polished cranium that floats around having practically sedimented socializing as a career and sleeps 3 hours a night. We have statements like this: “Federle has destabilized the square, its solid form, and turned it into something that no longer represents authority. His squares are defined by their relationship to the space around them. His compositions are decidedly non-hierarchical.” What's best: I believe it, it's a good description, good art writing, accurate. And it is totally ludicrous. Art is superposition of inanity and grave seriousness. That I like these paintings.

Birgit Megerle at Emanuel Layr

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Banality in the soft technicolor of handtowels. Or looking more like the hand-coloring of black and white photographs. Adding rose to the cheeks of children, ceruleans to the skies. The PR would chide you for not liking dogs, that populist obedient critter which, like sunsets, seem to be beyond reproach in culture. "like sunsets, both the near endless regurgitations of saccharine accident, cliche." But above take these forms and squeeze cotton candy out from it, spank the sunset for its bruise.


See too: Wolfgang Tillmans at Maureen Paley, Amelie von Wulffen at Reena Spaulings, Amelie von Wulffen at Barbara Weiss, “J A N U A R Y” at dépendance

Tess Jaray at Exile

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 The history of western modernism is one of secularization, no longer higher powers commanding but instead argued for in manifestos, the age of critics who proclaimed the usefulness of aesthetics (or anti-aesthetics) in a society increasingly industrialized and pressurized to extract value from everything, including art, and putting Greenberg on tirade, espousing the paradoxical function of an art ostensibly for only art's sake. The critic pokes the painting, saying "C'mon. Do something." The need for painting to "function" so sublimates into art that it becomes naturalized, becomes necessary. (Even art that is destructive, anti-, or wanton is recouped and given function by its "criticality," by saying things like its "opposition to dominant order." Immediately closed back into.) But so, precursor to Tomma Abts, painting as configurations, organized. We like organized paintings, because organization implies meaning, a function, a higher order. We like function, a use. A well constructed painting like a chair begins to feel functional, a painting like a Swiss army knife, capable of many situations.