Autumn Ramsey at Crèvecoeur

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You can't write an ode to a rose, you can't praise a flower already so decorative. The rose was manufactured, it's image doesn't exist in nature - it was cultivated by science, gardeners, botanists, whose Icarus-like purpose was to strike at god, the consumer, with something more red, more voluptuous, more synthetically emblematic of verbose Beauty. The rose is a sick and twisted beast, tattoo'd into a vacuous cliche. And it is this excess artificiality that Ramsey's paintings do well, acknowledging their plastic grandeur - it is synthetic, a drug, a worldview hybridized from research chems, paint and brush. The decorative layered on the cliche. This is your grandma commenting on how much she loves your teenage wall's prismatic dancing bear. Then later it's the reverse, finding yourself staring up at your grandma's wood paneled wall, finding yourself liking her painting of a duck, its okay to like a painting of a duck, it just doesn't feel right.

Martine Bedin at Crèvecoeur

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Art is a ludicrous object, a Rube Goldberg device for some strange cultural malignancy. But art's basic forms mask the inanity. Painting is a format that seems to tautologically explain itself, it's a painting, it's meant for walls. In this way artwork falsely naturalizes. Bedin's objects evolve structures that prevent naturalization, like peacock tails they are partly too stupid for this world, but somehow biologically necessary. Design which refuses to be necessary, importantly. 

Alain Guiraudie at Crèvecoeur & Timothy Kelly at Can

(Can, Crèvecoeur)

A joke about photography being the Hoover of the world, indiscriminately sucking.

Louise Sartor at Crèvecoeur

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It used to be that tapestries were the most valuable, we prized labor which each stitch proved, then genius was invented and we prized painting as its creative embodiment, value. Now painting fears replacement, desperately nails its aura to the wall. We spent 30 years whinging in big journals that painting was dead, or dying (or unnaturally resurrected braindead seeking brains, electrified by market) but what if what kills painting isn't the turgid laments of the cranially shined, but simply that it looks too much like the image in the age of its hyper-inflation, they start to look cheap. Defenses agains it: object and aura, but also, skill? Stay tuned.

Autumn Ramsey at Crèvecoeur

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This would be the, at least, 4th cat butthole - this one with lips of thighs to attend a sort of mollusk rear. (There's also been at least one, albeit less luxurious, dog butt.) Trying to describe a hole, an absence, but a thing rife with image: the son of god appears in a dog. (Google "dog butt Jesus.") The point being, the rear of a cat is an icon for the mirage factory of Ramsey - the butt is the nexus where the world goes abstract, the fur whorls, the thing, like a Klein bottle, turns in on itself, disappears. Self empties. Self decorates its hole hallucination. Like all the roses. 

See too: Martín Soto Climent at Proyectos Monclova

Naoki Sutter-Shudo at Crèvecoeur

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The trinket functions like a flower, a desirous other, holding some promise. We don't know what it is for, but it feels for something. The flower was beautiful before we knew its sexual radish. A promise on its lips. "the fantasy of [function], that thing that serves us. Of course something erotic about that. A table accepts your feet on it, the meat grinder barfs sausage by the mile, generates. A complaint-less subservience, erotic." An object that gestures its need, its promise for, with wet eyes blinking.

See too: Matt Paweski at Park View/Paul Soto, Naoki Sutter-Shudo at Bodega (1), Naoki Sutter-Shudo at Bodega (2)

Mathis Collins at Crèvecoeur

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Perviously there was a speaker for an eye, which makes a metaphoric sense for the haptic reversal of carving. Seeing a feel. The vibration of carving, a touch without. The labor dabbles the surface. While Guston's heavy belabored stroke plodded its anxiety, the sweat here seems less anxious than proof of work, not frivolous, not quite etched in stone, but heading there.