Rosie Lee Tompkins at BAMPFA

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That paint has become the signifier of High Art seems arbitrary, a historical fluke, difficult to decide whether comical and infuriating. At different times tulips and tapestries were more valuable - commissioned paintings of tulips were mere souvenirs to the tulips themselves, etc. The shifting values of culture come with the ideological pretense that those values are either now ideal (progressive) or eternal (traditional), that painting, like diamonds, are and have always been, forever - the grand narrative hung in most western institutions. Greenbergian discussions of Painting in hindsight are comically infinitesimal  - Pollock's great breakthrough of image and object seems groundbreaking only in the history of paint, outside this very tight parameters the distinction is null. "Painting" becomes the history of paint, a substance as any other without the valorization of High Culture. And paint is dumb with that.

Miyoko Ito at BAMPFA

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Paintings that look constructed, built like homes, making their abstraction like a plan for its composition. Ito's paintings are plain, direct, and confusing, a straightforward depiction belying its subterfuge. You unpack their construction like the pleasure of a model, or architectural funbook, same as of say Tomma Abts, huge precursors to the puzzification and surreal ipad-iconists of today, the trend for paintings tangled icon of itself, abjuring the directness of recognition that design implies, instead designed for misrecognition.

"The pleasure of Abts’s paintings is that of origami, or well constructed puzzle, like setting a good corner in New Mexico pasture, the blankness of a Morandi, solving simply its own internal puzzling, like shaker furniture, a clever construction in a protestant like satisfaction of a few-frills job completed."



See too: Tomma Abts at David Zwirner, Charline von Heyl at Gisela Capitain, Emily Mae Smith at Rodolphe Janssen, Ray Yoshida at David Nolan, Sascha Braunig at Kunsthall Stavanger, Alice Tippit at Night Club, Lui Shtini at Kate Werble, Sascha Braunig at Rodolphe Janssen, Sascha Braunig at Foxy Production, Mathew Cerletty at Office Baroque, Oscar Tuazon at Le Consortium & Paradise Garage