Chadwick Rantanen at Michael Benevento Gallery & Aria Dean at Progetto

(Benevento, Progetto)

Silent instruments, silence musicians. Artists castrate sound. What is the resonance of mute instrument? What is the sound of one hand clapping? Between the form and the lost notes is the gap, the fissure allowing the viewer fill meaning in that distance. Blue ball you until you mean it. 

Chadwick Rantanen at Bel Ami

(link)

".. collected images of the cross. ...Rantanen removes the cruciform’s transom or horizontal beam, reducing it to a simple column. The subtle alterations are surgical...  grafting and stitching to restore ...."

At first was thinking circumcision, but realized: it's tearing off the wings a butterfly, removing the potential of resurrection/metamorphosis - returning the butterfly to its immanent flightless body, a grub, snivelling across surface. Witnesses say "flee from idolatry ...  Because there is one loaf, we, although many, are one body, for we are all partaking of that one loaf." No transcendence. A staircase to nowhere, here.

Chadwick Rantanen at STANDARD (OSLO)

(link)

The PR opens with a scene of torture. And which, these are torturous objects. They are the cutoffs, the excess of standardized goods, the bits that exist because it is cheaper to produce excess and waste it than to produce exactly what is required. A quirk of capitalist efficiency, physical hiccups. They are waste, and this is upcycling from hell. This is trash into an agnostic crucifix, into a "devotional object," something the PR hints we may supplicate to... Which there is a read here that capitalism is religion (or god) and the waste is the new christ on the cross, sacrificed again and again for everyone's sins. But that smells bad - that's just appending symbology to make your fetish seem rational. Rantanen just seems to love torturing the stuf of capital. Pretend to asphyxiate it. These are a kink, and we don't shame for that.

See too: Chadwick Rantanen at Essex Street, “May the Bridges I Burn Light the Way” at STANDARD (OSLO), Chadwick Rantanen at Team (bungalow)

Chadwick Rantanen at Secession

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"For his sculptures, Rantanen extracted the protective layer from rolls of new fabric, peeling it off like a layer of skin" like hospital's common procedure on horribly disfigured patients is to shave off sections of intact flesh into luncheon-meat-like sheets then run though a press into a mesh to be grafted over raw violence, like wallpaper pasted for cheery buildings hiding this slaughter, skins of paper garbage caught with arrows like St. Sebastian trussed with nice bondage knots, plastic bags caught in razor wire fencing, our trauma over mass trash hung over industrial steel drain pans portending the dripping we don't see but Rantanen has us inferring looming, like the plastics entering our blood, another sort of sublimated torture chamber type of deal.

Chadwick Rantanen at Team (bungalow)

(link)

Rantanen's torturing robotic animals, enacting their death throes, recall watching, young children, neighborhood kids, pressing electrodes to the white of a frog's belly, hand-cranking current to the animal's body tightening, rigid in convulsion, seize, immobile, repeatedly, until the frog was permanently immobile and thrown overhand back to the pond, one of three markers of sociopathic behavior, the frog in the air.


See too: Chadwick Rantanen at Essex Street, “May the Bridges I Burn Light the Way” at STANDARD (OSLO), Nancy Lupo at Kristina Kite & Yuji Agematsu at Miguel Abreu,

“May the Bridges I Burn Light the Way” at STANDARD (OSLO)

(link)

Our growing attraction to garbage makes a psychologic sense as we become hostages to the trauma of dealing with it, the deranged images of garbage spewing, animals asphyxiated, learning of its intravenous networks sprawling across the landscape in unstoppable yet leaky pipes, garbage moved though our veins, beginning to see trash everywhere, even the paintings on view seem about the accumulation of detritus, cultural historic or otherwise, there's just stuff everywhere, stuff here a technical term for the quasi-differentiated mass, confusing a tarp, a trash bag and a tent.


See too: Chadwick Rantanen at Essex Street, Oscar Tuazon at Le Consortium & Paradise Garage

Chadwick Rantanen at Essex Street

(link)

Mass market crap given torture burden, little batteries tasked oversized objects, drones that will exhaust soon. AAA batteries have a little under half the ampere-hours of their AA counterparts and Rantanen has made them to overwork themselves, speed demise, intentionally crafting kawaii critters to abuse their labor-force in the circuits of his machinery. The gestures seem less absurd than frustrated, Rantanen's exacerbation of late-stage-capital's more aggressively abject objects. Self-inflicted. The director of fetish crush films Jeff Valencia speaks often of desiring to be the subject under the feet of the crusher, identifying with the object/animal being crushed.


See too: Calvin Marcus, Chadwick Rantanen at Clearing, “Puddle, pothole, portal” at Sculpture Center, Dylan Spaysky at Clifton Benevento

Calvin Marcus, Chadwick Rantanen at Clearing

(link)

Ranaten's objects are itchy, irritants in a body desiring to reject them. Ranaten's concern for the commodic waste that comprises much of modern life differs from many in that its cheapness is amplified, overhead lights hanging, made a wedge, shards of waste, fluorescents are gallery expendables, hanging, turns not-yet-trash into splinters of it. The thought of plastic inside you, a blanket in plastic inside you.