Christopher Williams at Capitain Petzel

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Williams once admitted in an interview to looking at Contemporary Art Daily every morning, and one wonders how he feels about it now having had the scene slip so far from his particular register of work. Does he even recognize his anomaly in the deluge of representation? Even what might be considered his progeny - say Cameron Rowland - have rid themselves of the Knightly Cold Cuts opacity, with work that clearly delineates itself. Because we don't want opacity anymore, we want clearly established intent. This probably makes Williams important to moment, a medicinal flavor. But the en abyme of institutional/self reflection requires an outside party to discern the navel's tea leaves. Otherwise it's just tying up the institution in your ornate slick personal knots to look at your button. Otherwise it's just kink. 

Barbara Bloom at Capitain Petzel

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Displays themselves become uncanny; they are the living dead, lacking human they were designed for. They are stage without actors, so when we seen them we see death. (IKEA displays create anxiety that must be counteracted, feeling our homes could feel like death if we don't fill them with otherwise.)  This exhibition comes with a packet explaining which exact ghost haunts each.

Andrea Bowers at Capitain Petzel

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Surely the protest sign is a means of a populace's ability to steal back the language of advertising for its own self generally subaltern to the messages that those in power have the ability to broadcast at volumes stuporous. No one likes advertising, the brusqueness of messages to amplify through clipping of thought, but the protest sign attempts to recoup a voice that has been disenfranchised by a powerful who can drone it out with turn a monied knob. The protest sign requires streets and people to amplify. When it already has all the coronating volume of white walls and press packets and being sold in a blue chip gallery as a commodity it may no longer be protest sign.


 Peter Fend at Embajada

Charline von Heyl at Capitain Petzel

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It was important that within the slurry of Post-war abstraction's melting of representation remained the church-like atmosphere from which western painting stemmed: devotional painting still. If von Heyl's is different it's because the paintings trade this devotional for the more transactional address of advertorial cymbal crashing, of images striking, with attack, no slurry but legibility, recognition, even if recognition is nonsense, abstraction, just that you see its information.


see too: Charline von Heyl at Gisela Capitain

Barbara Bloom at Capitain Petzel

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You see son, it's emotional impact is its inability to tell you.  It can't fully delineate, er describe the thing it references, which makes you imagine something beyond what it's capable. You try to imagine a potentional, son.


See too: On Kawara at the Guggenheim, Oscar Tuazon at Le Consortium & Paradise Garage

Christopher Williams at Capitain Petzel &Lucy McKenzie and Laurent Dupont at Meyer Kainer

Christopher Williams at Capitain Petzel, Lucy McKenzie and Laurent Dupont at Meyer Kainer

Commuting in the same deception, that no amount of looking will explain the object/image, they are representations, deferring elsewhere, and never conceding what lay beneath.  Images are treachery, sight can betray. A genericising only serves to underscore the point. And that old po-mo question what does it mean for art that seeing reveals so little.


Nina Beier at David Roberts Art Foundation

Peter Piller at Capitain Petzel

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The earliest examples of art turning outward to creatures and power objects, before, in western cultures, quickly, and possibly with the rise of self-awareness, turned to self-reflection, depicting ourselves, our scenes with greater amounts of care, to now a contemporary world flush with depictions of ourselves, painting giving into the modern flora of advertising, adorning everything. If you judge narcissism by the amount of self-depiction in a culture, western culture rules. Historical painters' technical inventions are feats driving for vain indulgence: to render itself better. The eternal drive of the painter as masturbation in a mirror. All this self-reflection should beget self-awareness, but it doesn't, as colonialism is but one example, instead spreading ourselves everywhere, put pictures of ourselves everywhere, giant images of ourselves adorn everything, we erect them in stores to sell ourselves things, we paint heavily modified babes on our cars.

Laura Owens at Capitain Petzel

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Owens' signage always outsized its frame, the punk ethos of a fuck-all - without its blackened stylistic trappings - the sloths and cutsey beginnings were unbearably outlandishly brazen. The frame of Owens' painting adopts the virtual frame of the scalable, of billboards, icons and signage, painting as the translatable images of that much stronger visual culture of media, advertsinging, and the friendly ostenses of its grab to visually accost. What hides behind the nicety is an insidiousness of attentional assault.

See too  “International Laundry 2″ at Parisa Kind , Amanda Ross-Ho at The Approach, Mark Handforth at Kayne Griffin Corcoran ,