Theodora Allen at Blum & Poe

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I've been trying to think through this style of painting for half a decade at this point.

see here: 

Caroline Bachmann, Emily Mae Smith, Caitlin Keogh, Orion Martin, Sascha Braunig, Ray Yoshida at David Nolan, Andre Pierre at Central Fine, Julien Ceccaldi at Jenny’s, Josefine Reisch at Noah Klink, Alice Tippit at Night Club, Lui Shtini at Kate Werble, Anne Neukamp at Greta Meert

Call it, Byzantine icon influenced iPad Tarot painting. Maybe just, iPad Surrealism. Interface Astrology. 

"the priest, like the painter, is perhaps the manager of both realms"

Altarpieces similarity to modern GUI space makes them somehow anachronistically the most relevant from of painting, pre-renaissance painting systems matching those of the mass systems we interface with daily ... supplanting figuration with codes: image as icons broken into frames and grids of information with a skeuomorphic impression of religious wonderment. It is no coincidence that devotional paintings contain the same figurative depth as a iPad screen.

The interface, the organization of symbols to access higher planes.

Organization and display systems become the forms we think in, render the world, Tufte et al.  Google images, the iPhone, the interfacization of everything becomes predominant, and children swipe at books. Approach paintings as if they too are systems of information, signs, or, worse, informative.

... tarot cards finds alliance with art since the artwork has mutated to be less an object of beauty than a fount for interpretation. Art having gone from jewel to oracle. The point of art begins to be setting the spheres to rotate so they may occasionally align, a machine for semio-recombination we could call meaning. Artists become not merely the recombinators of signs, but the producers of machines to do this, to be turned to on, set to run. Endless interpretability becomes their function. This is art, possibly.

Clue board games. Painting converted to iOS, and graphical icons to redistribute sense. Building interfaces for interpretation ...Art seems doomed to be particularly suggestive tarot cards. 

your level of trust in the celestially telling matters less than the overall strategy: turning an artwork to an interpretable state and blinking, tea leaf divination in sporty Vegas-odds inkblots. We're primed to see meaning in information, in art, particularly when so bright and shiny, and thus here's lots to be said about these works, interpretation to be done, they'll pour forth all you are willing to extract from them. Perfect analysands. Like the wacky inflatable arm man drawing eyes to dealerships, Arakawa understands the qualifiers for "art," performing them with wacky panache, theatricalizing the artwork as a caricature of attention, art played to show its now quite standardized set of rules.

Mark Grotjahn Backcountry Blum & Poe, Los Angeles

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Probably one of the best parts of being crowned with the blue-chip, you get to start mass producing absolute eye-gougers and people accept it, are forced to take it, saying thank you thanks, asking for their slaughter. 

see too: Mark Grotjahn at LACMA, Mark Grotjhan at Karma

Darren Bader at Blum & Poe

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The buggery performed, inhabiting another's space with full cavity examination. Or more blurb friendly, Bader becomes Hannibal Lecter, less appropriation than a forcible taking of skins, wearing them like a costume to be paraded. A mere container for Bader's acting. Wool, Catala, Spaulings, Gonzalez-Torres, Ruscha, Albenda, Andre, and probably etc.

Possibly the reason a lot of artists hate Bader, besides the general impishness, is the refusal to perform any sort of critical consolidation of his practice, that moral underpinning of art, "criticality," (that ethic reproduced in art school).  Instead, at the cost of any "critical" structure, a near incessant expansion. His ability to take. Any of Bader's "good ideas" are buried in an avalanche of "any idea." Bader is exhausting.  A lot of artists - despite whatever art's claims to freedom, and ostensible rejection of cultural values - wouldn't let themselves behave half this stupidly. The criticism is perhaps that acting stupidly isn't really freeing, but really neither is what most artists do anyway. Mirrors are best when they are stupid.


see too:
Darren Bader at Andrew Kreps 2, Darren Bader at Sadie Coles, Darren Bader at Radio Athènes. Darren Bader at Kölnischer Kunstverein, Darren Bader at Andrew Kreps 1

Robert Colescott at Blum & Poe

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Brush work that drip sarcasm, almost wrinkling with disdain, irony and ire. White flesh is like a plastic coating, like a makeup applied. While the relations are never as ambiguous as Kara Walker's later inkblots; and history reconstruction sees Manet'a Olympian servant reimagined as Klimtian lovers or de Kooning's women as made to sell syrup rather than Kehinde Wiley's grandiose revisionism; and the threading of cultural forms a bit more bare than Kerry James Marshall kaleidoscopes, you can see their protostages here in Colescott's struggle to unite them, the contradictory modes, grandiosity, uncertainty, self-deprecation, anger, and pain.

Shio Kusaka at Blum & Poe

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Epicurean pottery, pleasure in the temperate, reserved handling of sensitivities implying a virtuous stake in its bright pleasure, internally luminous to mirror the porcelain souls of consumers who desire them - inordinate number of writing insinuating how much you are going to "want one" and they do after all make a point to confuse commodity, aesthetic and functional forms, defiantly vessels, or toys - anti-decadence assigning morality to their commodity which itself became a massive trend post 2008 recession, austerity itself becoming a thing to sell.


See too: Juha Pekka Matias Laakkonen at Corvi-Mora

Daniel Lefcourt at Blum & Poe

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You could call it materiality porn. The deployment of new means depicting its picayune subject, the irrelevant accidents of masturbatory technique. Never a question of what to paint, but how to get it off. The PR tries to find the lost conception of a subject with the sonography of metaphor, putting us in the projectile sphere of imaging a ghost, the painter's "spill," imaged, cast and industrially reproduced. A cathedral-like requiem to the artist's petite mort, framed. Art villainy so in fashion.

See too :  Ned Vena at Société, Eric Wesley at Bortolami