Simone Leigh at David Kordansky

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"Not everything is available to everyone, not even to a privileged gatekeeper of culture such as myself. Such are the ongoing fantasies of the colonialist mindset. The museum, the Western institution I have dedicated my life to, with its familiar humanist offerings of knowledge and patrimony in the name of empathy and education, is one of the greatest holdouts of the colonialist enterprise. Its fantasies of possession and edification grow more and more wearisome as the years go by. Leigh’s work intimates the increasingly discomforting possibility that an overconfidence in the power of critique might itself be a vestige of privilege. I confess that more days than not I find myself wondering whether the whole damn project of collecting, displaying, and interpreting culture might just be unredeemable." -Helen Molesworth, Artforum

Calvin Marcus at David Kordansky

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Against a bedrock fear, of death, of castration, the nervous person searches for vitality and extension to ward off impotence and death with a "big one" like a muscle car, a militarized gun, a mid-life crisis and a trophy bass, and here a harhar painting to cover fear. You have sublimated your anxiety of death to a painting mocking that fear, but it's still a Mustang against death, a painting equivalent of a truck with nuts, underneath the irony, the wet-eyed naiveté, the fear, the fear.

Ricky Swallow at David Kordansky

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Cast the world in bronze, make it an image, a trophy. People like permanence. And these are an act of making-permanent, of embalming. Stupid, but permanent. We like permanence. The aesthetic of permanence. The Tuttles will melt but these will stay until our endtimes. A Tuttle made by Charles Ray. Mark Mander's Nocturnal Garden Scene, a slackness of rope converted to "a three-dimensional photograph." Against the Wurtzian resurgence these feel megalomanic.  A cartooning of the world rendered plastic. Casting your desire for forever.

Torbjørn Rødland at David Kordansky

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or meaning innuendo can only circle its prey for so long before we can infer its total, it is no longer suggestion but fully encircled into the arena of practice for a well thought circle or rut.


see too: Torbjørn Rødland at Air de Paris, Torbjørn Rødland at Henie-Onstad Kunstsenter, Torbjørn Rødland at Kunsthall Stavanger

Matthew Brannon at David Kordansky

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The decision to represent the mess of history with the cleanliness of silkscreen graphics - opposing the usual hair representing its miasma - commendable if symbols and things didn’t present their own interpretive vague, a tidiness become question of what’s been scrubbed. “the war from which my generation sprung was rarely spoken of.” cleaned to ominousness.  The “short timer” calendar, explained in the pr,* becoming glyphs for the artist object, interpreting another, the “soldier-‘artist’.” The “soldier-‘artist’”, the object-subject, the theater pieces Brannon has continually moved into, an interpretive scenery invented.

*“someone with less than 100 days left on his tour. During the war, some would draw calendars, often lewd, to count down their time. Brannon’s research led him to compose fictional renditions” 

Mai-Thu Perret at David Kordansky

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"Féminaire consists primarily of two bodies of work: [...] figurative sculptures positioned on a single plinth and a gridded wall arrangement of dozens of ceramic wall pieces"
"Immediate physicality is also a defining feature of the ceramic wall works [...]"
"Beginning with uniform rectangular slabs, Perret uses her hands to distort the material into torqued, unpredictable shapes [...] interaction between the artist’s body and the clay that absorbs her actions."

Against the delicate humans reposed, a visceral deforming of material. The body torqued, crushed with fingerprint remnant, a single hole. The figures have guns. Buy whichever, the holed or gunned, you wish, people watching sublimated wounds happen.


See too: Mark Prent at Mitchell Algus, Mai-Thu Perret, Olivier Mosset at VnH

Ruby Neri at David Kordansky

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"Fertility goddesses for the contemporary imagination;" the objects are a "fun" ironizing of femininity's tropes, of the goddess, a winking jest mocking the less progressive constructions of "woman" with comic timing while still being shackled to it. Whether we've moved past patriarchally constructed versions of woman (we haven't) we still get to feel some small relief of casting here the equivalent of a semiotic hex against it, which while cathartic still shows how brutally insistent those images are. The women branded 2016 to mark this moment. 

Valentin Carron at David Kordansky

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Carron's vague objects become conceptually blurry, rounding the corners of specificity to become pegs of exchangeablity where the tension of an art object is in occupying category rather than individuated objects, where Carron's object exist at the cusp of slipping over into, risking complete genericism.


See too: Darren Bader at Radio Athènes, Heimo Zobernig at Kunsthaus Bregenz, Ulla von Brandenberg at Pilar Corrias

Aaron Curry at David Kordansky

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Their shock of ugliness - vogue brandished as grotesque - is spectacular, feels cybernetic, jagged objects reaching (without painting's frame to hold them tastefully) they instead enter you as signs to implant within and deplete themselves with immediacy, their shock is one use only, and, spent, you feel used, having been inside you deployed themselves and left, the "bad" in 5 years will appear tasteful, mannered compositions of their time, totally respectable, but you'll remember.


See too: Aaron Curry at Michael Werner, Charline von Heyl at Gisela Capitain

Elad Lassry at David Kordansky

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If Lassry's photographs feel fetishistic it's because, like Furries costumed in fursuits as substitute for the slick lines of the anthropomorphic cartoon animals they desire sex with, Lassry's photographs dress their photograph as slick objects to anthropomorphize the objectifying seduction of photography's cartoon version, wearing a "fursuit" of the image color coded to the frame. Lassry's "photographs" self-objectify under gaze as tactile and plastic visual pleasure. They more cryptic the photo - deprived of its raisons, however "straight" - the more its surface appears in blankness, the blank allure of sexual consumability of surface and seduction, lozenges of virtual material. These ultra expensive objects "carved from single timbers of Claro walnut wood" will disperse into homes and be collected by those seeing them dispersed, consumed like cherries in Pac-Man.

See too: Lucy Skaer at Murray Guy

Tala Madani at David Kordansky

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Conjuring in the virtual theater of imagination's Matrix-like plane, Madani's paintings foreground drawing of imagination from an abyss, that, like Bacon's claustro-realms, become spaces for enacting and enacted belittlements and torture, and what this means for Madani in psychoanalytic terms is hard to tell.  Madani has been painting these men for a long time, and when a grey man in the soft shape of middle age sporting an open robed Santa outfit urinates on babies in a wallpapered room, there isn't a shock, the babies already wear the beards of their adulthood, they will age into the same men as all Madani's paintings and the atrocities we have become numb to.

Group Show at David Kordansky

Everyone loves the smell of their own brand, and the miasmia of this "immersive installation" wafts in with a laugh of its aesthetic impropriety.  Like a fart joke. The bastardization of the proper. Stray paint and design faux-pas. Even the more tasteful tinged yellow by Armelder's power bomb of a painting. It's a gas. Paintings which look the way "oopsie" sounds. Whether or not anyone else loves is it in relation to how deeply trapped they are with it. Fart aesthetics in the high speech.


see too : John Armleder at Fernand Leger , Ida Ekblad at Herald St.

Jonas Wood at David Kordansky

(Jonas Wood at David Kordansky)

With the dilute abstraction of today’s forever now atemporal soup, the reptilian pleasure of seeing objects painted feels like relief. To see something rather than sift histories. Like 8bit nostalgia, or Guston’s plodding brushwork, the faux-niavete of Wood’s style magnifies choices made in representation, the shortcuts and decisions. The chunking holds the object depicted behind the filter of its maker, Wood’s subjectivity of calculating how to represent, the decisions sedimented as strokes itself a subject. The way a boxer's tattoos get rendered, or the way the likely commissioned portraits become suddenly less wonky. It’s an act of framing, holding “painting” at slight remove, like the pots as paintings, framing the container.  It’s stupid fun.