Michiel Ceulers at Island

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Painting is a pornography and painters are the perverts, the press release says as much. Allow the painter to geek out and realize the depths of their depravity. Artists must choose how much exposure allowed. The painting's "inter-referential dynamics" could refer to masturbation or incest, it depends on the point of view. (Painterly masturbation is always incest?) And while, generally, paintings meta-game has become tiresome, it's more honest than most admitting to the game as an erotic self-pleasure. Denial, shame, release - this is the boardgames of the painter.

Batsheva Ross at Kantine

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The continued moves backwards, Monet was born about six years before Degas, which Shimizu's Monet was only a month ago now, asking all sort of question about whether this retro-revolution is accelerating its retrograde. Wait. When was Manet born? Wasn't that his scrotum just a couple days ago? A still seminal painter waiting to burst.

See too: Trevor Shimizu at Misako & Rosen, Forward to the Past

Marte Eknæs at Efremidis & Sam Lewitt at Z33 House for Contemporary Art, Design & Architecture

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(Efremidis, Z33)

Spooky object scary time. Ominous, cold. An emptiness we the viewer backfill with projections for what could be. See apparitions. See ghosts in the machine. Invent spirits in the trees, gods in the heavens that care about us. Artists as shamans show us the way, the truth, the light, the emptiness. 

Sterling Ruby at Xavier Hufkens

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One of the last of phalloaggrandized, a dude in denim with big "objects." Ruby turned size into a quality, blasted with whatever goo could be pumped. Cady Noland with a better and less critically engaged budget. They're supposed to be dumb - this is their ostensible critique. And it is true, seeing sculpture bumped to 18 feet resolutely failing to signify or even really mean, this is affecting. It's watching the big meaningless be enacted like a mountain. Wasteland hippie at size. Selling the experience of Nihilism for those with too much money to experience it themselves. And now as always selling some of the rubble at more manageable scales, as souvenirs for your walls at the cottage.


see too: Matias Faldbakken at Astrup Fearnley Museet

Yuji Agematsu, On Kawara at LA MAISON DE RENDEZ-VOUS

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What is contained in a day, what does a date contain, etc. If you pressed anyone on these questions they would admit the hairiness of the situation. But that isn't how we act, when we write press releases the questions themselves are preventatives against answers. This because "raising questions" is, we are told, the power of art. Which makes actually answering its questions a loser's affair - the questions must be kept on life support; Art, for its shareholders, must be eternal. (And thus why thousands of artists continue redeploying On Kawara's essential question. It becomes a mannered tool for evoking, but not answering, a question.) This is one of the worst aberrations of art. There is no critique if that critique never cancels. "Our fingerprints are ours, but we cannot be created from them."


See too: Kirsten Pieroth at Mathew, Sam Falls at 303 Gallery, Alan Ruiz at Bad Reputation, Trevor Paglen at Metro Pictures, Sarah Ortmeyer at Chicago Manual of Style, On Kawara at the Guggenheim,

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

Marianne Berenhaut at Island

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If the landfill is hell and the museum is hermetically sealed heaven, art is a practice of purgatorial attempts to suspend its items from the trash, place them onto the helmed cultural ships that navigate time, rather than fall to its bottom the whims and abject slaw of mud or whatever is at the bottom of the bin.


See too: B. Wurtz at Richard Telles & ICA LA, Dylan Spaysky at Clifton Benevento, Yuji Agematsu at Real Fine Arts,  Ser Serpas at LUMA Westbau

Nora Turato at LA MAISON DE RENDEZ-VOUS

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Language adrift from meaning. There's always more meaning. Like crap to chewed gum, something will stick to it,  Our active pink lump that attracts and minds the dirt, clings to any interpretable speck of concrete information. And hold it for contemplation. Both advertising and poetry leverage our interpretable bits to their advantage, opening us like a can - I'm not sure if we are meant to enjoy these or feel once again dispirited by their abuse of our good nature - our tender top, berated.


See too: Hanne Lippard, Nora Turato at Metro Pictures, Nora Turato at Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein

Jacqueline de Jong at Rodolphe Janssen

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Stylistic violence never registered strongly in painting. Like Picasso or de Kooning ripping and rearranging people, it's often mere composition. I've never found Guernica all that horrific. Abstraction's pulling reads less like the horror of war and more like the whims of painter. Ambiguous violence - of someone like Miriam Cahn - forces a viewer to complete the picture in their head, imagine their own violence.

Antoni Tàpies at Almine Rech

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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.

Simon Fujiwara at Dvir

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Among those trying to reassemble meaning in the fallout of Genzken and Harrison's cultural TNTing, Fujiwara's accumulations of content are not the endless permutations of cultural arrangements that make culture "speak," ala Danny McDonald et al. Instead they seem a return to narrative invested in its display systems that constructs that cultural story, history, myth, not just our garbage. Whether or not it actually assembles meaning, it at least looks a little more like it, by rebuilding the structures that construct it.


See too: Gertrude Abercrombie at Karma, David Lieske at MUMOK, Simon Fujiwara at Dvir (1)

Solange Pessoa at Mendes Wood DM

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I think we find some comfort in dirt smeared not because of its primeval "truth" but because it seems like it can't obsolesce, it can't be superseded, blown away as dust, which we mistake for being eternal.

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.

Leigh Ledare at Office Baroque

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Leigh's is titillating surely, anxious, naughty, filled with all the nervous transgression of an arthouse "social experiment". Haha what if we took an anxious group psychology project but added a documentary panopticon. Of course the projects are interesting as they are well polished mirrors, psychology is turned into a formal exercise of cinema. And this thing is made for essay explicating all the formal structures that mirror its conflict. Watch "psychology" made into object of art, humans into a petri-dish, cross-sections of a people for microscope slides. "Arguably more anthropological than therapeutic..." The problematization method,* a sort of making-confounded. Greying the waters with the tangling of culture: people made demographics made signifiers, and forced to abut and spark. People are made to be art's object which gets conflated with analysand. Good cinema is not necessarily healthy outcome.


*Think Renzo Marten's Enjoy Poverty, Jordan Wolfson's Animation Masks, Korine's Spring Breakers.  
(Watch the film through Ledare's website here.)

Sean Landers at Rodolphe Janssen

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We identify with cuteness, with the interminable wet-eyed critters of Disney, Pokemon, whatever latest commodified and neotenic rodent. Cuteness' pressure causing Pugs' eyes to bulge and esophagus to choke. (The stunted bone structure of Pikachu leaves him in constant pain.) And Landers' plaid animals, sad clowns, and now a pinocchio "plankboy" are the means of a lesser sort of identification. Landers' characters are not focus-group perfected. And their revulsion is "an effect of anticlimax created by an unintentional lapse in mood from the sublime to the trivial or ridiculous." Like Greek mythos for a plankboy or Moby Dick in flannel. The definition of bathos. Which Landers prances sad clown around. Landers paintings "arousing pity, especially through vulnerability or sadness," pathetic.


See too: Sean Landers at Friedrich Petzel

Michaela Eichwald at dépendance

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We've all grown tired of our stomachs pumped for the lumpy biomorphics that pox contemporary art. But Eichwald at least willing to risk the true browns that those otherwise glossy ceramics cheerily self-sweeten with candy coating. Eichwald threatens actual excess, dribbles that could still stain, or, like graffiti, are already stained, vandalized. Which Eichwald's do feel, vandalized - graffiti's defecated signatures - that pink one scratched into with like a school desk's attempted Baphomet that comes out more as a hairy devil with tits, not really satanic at all. Because the acne poxed kid's hard desire for satanism outshines his ability to actually conjure it. This is endearing. And there's a joke in here about teenage bedsheets too, but both failed satan and besotted sheets are of that teenage libidinal excess that has a tendency to spill, run over, an excess energies that stain things. Teenagers stain things.

Latifa Echakhch at Dvir

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These occasional perspective oddities, switches to god's eye view. Exchanging the usual viewing experience for a maximum the information. A maximum information which stands in for the viewing itself, a purely fictional realm made for documentation. "Like a cartography on the ground" like god arranging his terrain, the pins on the map arrange the world, only the overseer, the omniscience we crave.


See too: Jessica Vaughn at Martos

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.

Marguerite Humeau at Clearing

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An excess of reference. B I O M O R P H I C. Biologic inkblots. 2010's Surrealism has metastasized into camp, into theatrics. Once clocks melted, now whales do, stretched, ballooned, dragged in the virtual and dropped in the physical, cast in medical looking material (which is its own trend). Ten years ago we all thought Matthew Barney was too much, now look at us. We've literally reinvented him over and over.


See too: “Being Thing” at Centre International d’Arte et du Paysage & Treignac Projet,

“Ungestalt” at Kunsthalle Basel

Anna Zacharoff at Kantine

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PR: "Some might say that a dollhouse is an expression of scale. It is a domestic monument and an architecture of absolute control."

Which CAWD previously: "So artistic turns to dolls and miniatures and virtuality makes symptomatic sense: an expression of a need for control over a world we increasingly do not. There is a dissonance between our interior worlds which we find virtual and beholden to our godlike control of a drag/drop materiality conjuring sex in our glass or products from its depths. Digital desires that the physical world increasingly doesn't reflect. The model allows the physical world marionette to an invisible hand in which we trust."

"The Model becomes predominate as the world's point of scale becomes unmoored, and reality floating between the virtual and material conditions abstracted by floating points of enumeration etc. etc. The model encapsulates this world governed by virtual features, the planning, projected statistical everything, abstraction of everyday. Looking down at our hands the sphere of the earth is said to be at our fingertips. This abstraction feels lived in."

There is here though a clever inversion with the documentation, which turns the virtual plane, model, CAD, into an ouroboros en abyme. We float. We all float in here.


See to: Mathis Altmann at Halle für Kunst Lüneburg, Mathis Altmann at Freedman Fitzpatrick, Gina Folly at Ermes-Ermes,