Theresa Chromati at Tureen

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Like a Miro pulled through the navel of Murakami - it's an orgy of "design." Like dragging your finger through still-wet modernism, and sprinkling some sprinkles. And apparently testicle flowers. But tugging content through a bellybutton an interesting idea. 

Jessie Homer at Various Small Fires

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The self-proclaimed “regional narrative painter” who honeymooned at Elizabeth Taylor's estate and lived at "an idyllic 2½-acre estate in Beverly Hills." Grandma Moses or Clementine Hunter style depiction of rural cemeteries inflects differently painted from the window of wealthy LA county. "Self-taught" but in a Beverly Hills estate sense. None of this would matter if folk traditions weren't generally class traditions. 

Mathew Cerletty at The Power Station

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As "photography" becomes ever more processed by virtual machines, and "realism" so abstracted beyond anything concrete, the term "photorealism" becomes meaningless against our cartoon stuf. The new plastic real. The protagonists of Toy Story are not representations of cowboys or Space Rangers, their being is rendering: "YOU ARE A TOY," screams the sheriff of this reality. But through the power of movie magic, they are suspended between. Their image is the real, the world around them is made false, a rendering in comparison. When you buy the cartoon sponge off the shelf, you don't purchase the one in your hand, you purchase that higher order of its affective image, its grease scrubbing sorcery. This higher order that arranges us. Originals without origin. Which rubber duck is this? Where is this image located?

Martin Soto Climent at Michael Benevento & Yuji Agematsu at The Power Station

(link: Martin Soto Climent, Yuji Agematsu)

The enrapture of sensitivities, enwrapment, a container allowing movement, transaction. The Amazon box that allows its sales; cardboard a larger problem than the items it contains. The packaging that makes up the mass majority of waste.  Shouldn't we be speaking more of wrapper than "content", the mass majority of garbage that we have become hostages who love their captors to, enshrine odes to our hurt.

Nancy Lupo at Kristina Kite & Yuji Agematsu at Miguel Abreu, Yuji Agematsu at Real Fine Arts,  Yuji Agematsu at Artspeak, “May the Bridges I Burn Light the Way” at STANDARD (OSLO, Martín Soto Climent at Proyectos Monclova, Martín Soto Climent at DREI, Martin Soto Climent at Atlantis

Steven Parrino at The Power Station

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The slick seductive surface of James Dean wrapping his vehicle around another thrown through glass, rolling across the pavement, the shiny waste of his wreckage, the waste of something beautiful. David Fincher. It’s cool to watch violence. Wet things across pavement. Entropic angst, saying no to dad and smoking indoors.  It feels anti-authoritarian to buy a leather jacket. It doesn’t matter that the jacket is pleather, it's that smoking indoors feels [fucking (ed.)] good.

Paola Pivi at Dallas Contemporary

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"These gestures are about freedom." A Childlike freedom attaining adult power, a cartoon friendliness abstracting its happy bludgeon of reality. The world to putty to whatever libidinal desire or dreams, placing Zebras dying in the Arctic. It seemed fun. An absurdism that borders on the psychotic, like Burden's childlike megalomania masquerading as glee, fun hides its stupid destruction of reality in which, above all, our dreams must be manifest.


See too: Paola Pivi at Emmanuel Perrotin, Chris Burden Metropolis II at LACMA, Henning Bohl at What Pipeline, Sadie Benning at Mary Boone & Callicoon Fine Arts

Michaël Borremans at Dallas Museum of Art

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Here the flesh returns to painting as Borremans' waxy version attempting to reestablish a corporeality that Tuymans, Richter, Sasnal paints our distance from. Borremans reconnects the body to its threat. Like early scenes in horror films - prior first blood - Borremans' forebode body-violence by situating it it within disorientating relations, establishing it as flesh. The body is imparted the possibility of being threatened. Borremans' realism exists to position the body capable of bodily "abstraction," (violence) the subtle wavering of flesh constructed by painter using brushstrokes to threaten hurt. Like Guston's plodding version establishing the act of drawing a painting, a Borremans painting loosens (abstracts) to threaten the body what could be done, coming apart with the fragile blow of a stroke. If the trope of horror-films was to die after sex, it was because the carnality established the body as fragile, human, meat; sex filled the character with blood for the destruction to come. I don't watch a lot of horror, but my guess is that there is another equal trope of putting body through some kind of medical examination, or equal expose, a moment to rub lotion into its skin, soften them. Borremans paintings are like that, trying to regain ground lost by those Germans who would coldly render it by giving its corpse (painting and body) back its blood.
Borremans treads dangerously close to the Gottfried Helnwein, a disserving though important relation, it exists as what Borremans is not but could be, treads close to, kitsch-horror. Making Borremans relation with an uncomfortable line plainly silly by having the line already crossed and staked and surveyed by an artist with all the bright lights showing, Hollywood actors writing favorable copy. It's unfortunate for Borremans having the third act of the horror show already known.

And see too: Luc Tuymans at David Zwirner, Andro Wekua at Sprüth Magers, Thomas Eggerer at Richard Telles, Kaoru Arima at Misako Rosen