Kate Newby, Daniel Rios Rodriguez at Nicelle Beauchene

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Both's attention to naturalism, to the brown you may have noticed in stores having enveloped our packaging to stand for its green, the ecological concern signified by "brown." And "Natural" you may also have noticed has no FDA governance and can be, without recourse, stated about things like gasoline and high-fructose corn syrup, maybe steel nails. Natural, like nature, creates a negative distinction, we are said to go out "into nature" to pretend we are distinct from it, to pretend there worlds distinct from mankind. Like the trend in homes, bars, everyone hauling reclaimed wood by the tonnage deep into the city, West Elm mass producing it, in attempt to reclaim some authentic experience separate from the glass we touch all day in pocket. But the glass like the gallery can bring us anything, it appears on screen, in white fields, in front of you, your touch of nature, your finger grease smeared on it.


Kate Newby at Kunsthalle Wien, Daniel Rios Rodriguez at Lulu, N. Dash at Casey Kaplan

Group Show at Michael Benevento

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Like Chow's cephalopodic frames, Kelly's skeletal chandelier diatoms, or Rodriguez's chitinous crust, there's a hard exo to hold something viscous inside, in the dry waste something sentimental, organic, wet.


see too: Daniel Rios Rodriguez at Lulu, Milano Chow at Mary Mary

Daniel Rios Rodriguez at Lulu

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The crust laden and the spiritual, it's hard to do sentimentality in art without being an outsider. You can't paint a flower without ironizing its loveliness, your desire to impress this. Sentimentality drips into its performance, theatrical, a too-much-presence and we blush for the artist having fallen into the trap of their own subjectivity for them, too often. Thick paint helps. It alleviates with its own paintertly over-presence, which provides, if not an ironizing, at least a solidarity. The paint expresses materially the same excess as the subject is. Confidence in clumsiness, endlessly endearing, a situation where you'll want to care for them.


See too: James Lee Byars at VeneKlasen/Werner