Nazim Ünal Yilmaz at Exile

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A lot of painting functions by tensioning the relationship between painting and its cultural myth  - think the Neanderthalism of Joe Bradley, Krebber, or conceptually negated Sturtevant, the printer of Guyton, the signature of Josh Smith, the bruising history of von Wulffen, necrotics of Richter, the fordist production lines of Koons, Craven, Murakami, Kaws. Etc. Neurotic affairs with "painting." But occasionally painting succeeds by making us forget the relation to its myth, succeeds as a painting without history, paints something else and Painting we get to forget about.


previously: (1)Julie Beaufils at Balice Hertling, (2)Marlene Dumas at Zeno X, (3)Svenja Deininger at Collezione Maramotti, (4)Eliza Douglas at Air de Paris

Tess Jaray at Exile

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 The history of western modernism is one of secularization, no longer higher powers commanding but instead argued for in manifestos, the age of critics who proclaimed the usefulness of aesthetics (or anti-aesthetics) in a society increasingly industrialized and pressurized to extract value from everything, including art, and putting Greenberg on tirade, espousing the paradoxical function of an art ostensibly for only art's sake. The critic pokes the painting, saying "C'mon. Do something." The need for painting to "function" so sublimates into art that it becomes naturalized, becomes necessary. (Even art that is destructive, anti-, or wanton is recouped and given function by its "criticality," by saying things like its "opposition to dominant order." Immediately closed back into.) But so, precursor to Tomma Abts, painting as configurations, organized. We like organized paintings, because organization implies meaning, a function, a higher order. We like function, a use. A well constructed painting like a chair begins to feel functional, a painting like a Swiss army knife, capable of many situations.