Shabahang Tayyari at Balice Hertling

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These are nice (Iranian patterning meets cybernetic Guy Fieri Art Deco?) though wishes for the embedded content to be less burned images and more left to surface, but surely that just another means in a long tradition in finding representation for forbidden figuration?

See too: Sarah Morris at Berggruen

Julie Beaufils at Balice Hertling

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Like cutting a rose from a watermelon, everyone wants the sweet fruit but we facet a composition. This is a metaphor for painting.

Group Show at Balice Hertling Project Space

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Prediction, this is what the next 2 years will look like. Rita Ackerman rococo with all the little pointy bits you can muster. Plus fashion. "a series of 32 posters, a collection of objects, a collective mood, a discarded film-set, a ritual ground -and a platform for a community"

Puppies Puppies (Jade Kuriki Olivo) at Balice Hertling

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Again a public-domaining.  Or what the we'd call "appropriation" or the "readymade." But the PR, which is good, is right in persuading away from language like the readymade; it noting that, elsewhere in the gallery, the triggers hung on the wall have been removed (and permanently disabled) from US firearms which is not precisely reproduction or repetition of the world since it effectively "castrates" their noodley bit. This against the readymade reminiscent of D+G: "Mimicry is a very bad concept, since it relies on binary logic to describe phenomena of an entirely different nature.  The crocodile does not reproduce a tree trunk, any more than the chameleon reproduces the colors of its surroundings.  The Pink Panther imitates nothing, it reproduces nothing, it paints the world its color, pink on pink; this is its becoming-world". Again the PR: "Puppies Puppies has always fiddled with the broken membrane between imagination and the experience of reality". That we can rearrange the world for us to fit into, remake it to our desires, have every right be as legitimate a Spongebob as Nickelodeon, and write our own as canon. Be the Carpenter you want to see in the world.


See too: Puppies Puppies at What Pipeline, Puppies Puppies at BFA Boatos

Neïl Beloufa at Balice Hertling

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It's the distance between the thing and Beloufa's ruinous plastic version, showing light through its facade of Sci-Fi film, Reality video, and trade show beauty. Belfoufa's distilled tropes and cliches we have come to culturally love in the fun cardboard playtime version of; enjoyability in the mastery of lubricating forms of cultural massage, mediums of libidinal and candied fun.  We watch the sci-fi without the baggage of plot or anything really, just the wet surface of cold sci-fi, the gloss of display systems and fetish for the warm succulent life.

And see too: Timur Si-Qin at Carl Kostyál , Zak Kitnick at Clearing

Will Benedict at Balice Hertling

Benedict revolves the art world like a key to a scene. He's probably not in charge, or even all that connected to it, but he's become an unspoken masthead, or mascot. Everyone wants some part of it, and for the last number of years he's been everywhere, in countless exhibitions seen.
Here mud encrusted corporate zombies replacing Benedict’s friends would seem a step in the direction of content, all with the musical furniture, but its a more a move, like many of Benedict’s, of bland displacement, of using blank markers in the codified gallery system, the contextual architecture of art; and like before's paper shrimps, the addendum of little washy paintings ironize the whole thing, once again displacing meaning, blankly nice. To say that these are actually starting to look better would be besides the point. It's more interesting to look at them as examples in the codified strata in the art world, gestures and attempts.