David Diao at Postmasters

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At its base, Diao's work appears as information. The work could be "meaningless" - contextually barren - and still retain a power by its ability to look decipherable, like ciphers, like things that denote a meaning with or without you.


See too: Vern Blosum at Kunsthalle Bern

David Diao at Marta Cervera

Diao’s work is often premised in the metanarrative established over the paintings, the provenance of painting, his own career, his fictional career hopes etc. Here the press release is in Spanish and the painting’s text in Cyrillic alphabet. We’re left with a formal mystery, of architectural bits printed and isolated, repeated, and painted as geometric abstraction, layered, and compared with futurist exhibitions, and then plus the Cyrillic.
The work extends a net of hope-to-be explication around itself, building and deferring and gesturing at itself, a slow-build complexing that structure a space of confusion and doubling back and second guessing. Somehow R.H. Quaytman meets Daan van Golden, weirdly.