Elliott Jamal Robbins at Kai Matsumiya

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Not quite drawing, nor painting, nor animation. Not quite Kentridge or Madani or Churchman's Painting Treatments. More Guston's heads. But messier. More nebulous. A tough position when we demand art be "about something;" want the museum jewel of didacticism - or the troll of question's eyerollingly forever. But these happily float in goo and blood and guts. It's more Pope.L writing jokes without punchlines, the unease in letting an audience hang. Be with themselves over this mess. Sketches without objects, just sketches, which are real ideas. "A drawing does what so much art must artificially prevent - its exhaustion. A drawing is only an idea, a scratch pad for the realized candy. The drawing is instructions for a creation inside your head. What SFX and kunsthalle budgets can concretize will never match the monster hiding in the closet of your mind."

See too: "If laughter was the earthquake alleviating the tension of the joke, then Pope.L's don't really relief its valve. A refusal that turns humor into a weapon where misunderstanding the joke might have risks. "White Peo abstr ation." Pointed fingers. What are the stakes of misunderstanding? The generalized artworld fear of misinterpretation becomes conflated with the generalized fear of Blackness, of one's foot in one's mouth, of white spaces suddenly filled with an innuendo that doesn't confine itself to safe quotational space of art..."

Elliott Jamal Robbins at Park View/Paul Soto

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The commitment to drawing, rather the juiced paintings they could be monied as, seems important. "A difference between cartoons/comics and paintings is that comics ask you to understand them but paintings ask you to identify them." A drawing seems intended that you understand it. And so when the murky demands of painting enter them, there becomes a confusion of subject. Hazing aesthetic demands. The artist waits to pull the light-cord of an idea, the phallic gun of abstraction's seminal order, onto a conveyer belt of canvas, gets his identity in order, Tap, Click, POW, Splash, Whoosh, Whir, and Tssk, a production is all too mechanic, paint a depressing fog, maybe a spray of brains. 

See too: Elliott Jamal Robbins at Kai Matsumiya

Elliott Jamal Robbins at Kai Matsumiya

(link)

discombobulating the characters, Snow White and the black protagonist cultural antipodes, forced atop each other, its Disney surely dissonant with black male experience: a snippet plays stating that a lot of women were roused to voting early which would have felt reassuring then had we not later learned white women voted Trump. Sadness feeling most intense when there is nothing to be done with it, can't be channeled, and the depression of your body on the mattress becomes sinister cave, stuck to National Public Radio's days before the US election, an anachronism replayed in your head, is made worse in actually having the recording. Enough emotional dissonance eventually causing psychologic desensitization, feeling a lot like living slumber.