Merlin James at Kerlin Gallery

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For all our interest in "pushing the boundaries of painting" or whatever, James shows how weird painting can actually be. So far outside current tastes that not even sure we like them, ugly as hell, but beauty is dead. These totally void the question of the painter alignment chart -  what did Hainley say about Dianna Molzan, they "vogue their structure"? These are like painting trying to turn itself into a car. Even the dumbly painted ones, paintings trying to pretend they're a cat. 

See too: Richard Aldrich at Gladstone Gallery, Torey Thornton at Essex Street

Kathy Prendergast at Kerlin

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Scientists detect distant planets by measuring the color shifts marking the slow wobble in the precession of stars. The unseen planet's gravity pulling on the star. The amount of wobble infers the size of the planet orbiting it, with everyone hoping for a roughly earth sized planet in the "hospitable zone" to make headlines and add to the list places where life may exist. The point is looking at the blacked-out-except-for-cities's-dots atlas pages is analogy to the stars-which-may-harbor-life. You look at them and imagine worlds.
Like Lutz Bacher's interest in the granular, or Paul Thek's dust, or Gonzalez-Torres' replenishing feilds, it converts the world into an expanse, appending distance, we feel distant, its loss, its dissolve, things returning to dust.


See too: Lutz Bacher at 356 Mission

“Take This Gun And Stick It” at Ellis King

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A press release staging the objects in the doorway of the libidinal. Oft stated: Art is an object determined and structured by our relationship to desire, an object created of what we want to see exist in the world and even the staggering repression of desire by someone like say Christopher Williams becomes instead paraphilia rejection of bodily pleasure, instead expressing bodily shame, instead only the over-clean pleasure of what the product affords, a fetishistic antipodal relation to desire, and thus sick, circling all our hairy wet need. But so less oft said is our current and growing vogue for the micro-attention to the formal aspects of art begins to further and further be capable of discussion in terms of sexual fetish, desire is rerouted into inanimate objects, feel latex or the suspended touch leaving them blue balled and in agony.


See too: Fetish, Phillip Lai at Modern Art, Chadwick Rantanen at Essex Street, Olga Balema at Croy Nielsen

Giorgio Griffa at The Douglas Hyde Gallery



These gain import through Arte Povera, making their restraint sensible, attending to the physicality of painting, the importance in the folds, still crisp, in the heavy cotton. The way they hang hotly against a wall, but still one would hope for the crisp refreshing coolness of Kimber Smith who allowed a little more play in the restraint, making things a little weirder, and little dumber than what’s on here. They’re just so gentle, and nice. I mean they’re nice, but just so nice. In the impoverished context they’re almost sensible, make total sense.