Bill Hayden at Federico Vavassori

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Damn remember Real Fine Arts? The website is gone so you can't. Wish I could. What a run. Too bad. Our memory has gotten so short. Perhaps the memory that it happened is better than the warts of photography. Better to have the option to delete oneself. Because now the drawings just look unaccounted for, look really great. 

Genoveva Filipovic at Federico Vavassori

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The scatlogical undertones of most painting goes unremarked, its primordial stuff, energized by libido, as dirt suspended in goo, as some form of infantile creation, of selling dirty diapers.
"It would be an interesting history correlated, the desublimation of painting, its id-ification, from the surrealist's subconscious to Pollock's becoming "nature" to finally the triumph of neanderthalism (of say Joe Bradley) the history of men's important doodle and the mythology of the infantilized artist. We must care for him, them, genius whose diapers we exchange."
Filipovic's "toy with the white cube’s capacity to render a pile of [brown stuff] expensive." according a Frieze review of her Vilma Gold show. Not even Shimizu's were this shitty even when expressly painting it, and people eating it. But provisional crappiness here seems the point, the reverse digestion of painting's normal sublimation turned to shit.

Lisa Ponti at Federico Vavassori

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There isn't a single photo of a painting, just install shots where white space crowns, a frame of real estate stands in for gilding, lighting like a halo. Then weirdly you can find some of them here, a 95 year old artist on A4.



See too:Brian Calvin at Le Consortium, Florian Hecker & John McCracken at Künstlerhaus KM- , Midway Contemporary Art

Matthew Watson at Federico Vavassori

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That despite the overtness of their visual frenzy - the visible rendered as technical proficiency - and the importance placed upon it, the visible is - or could feel- unnervingly subordinated to our relation to and what we know of the objects, which is very little, the heavy weight placed toward their unidentifiable reason versus the degree of their depiction, and the less we know about these objects the more psychotic they become: the arbitrariness of the subject incommensurate with the exhaustive - pathological - attention paid, and even if the objects are of some discerning import - which, doubtful - what good does paying them attention in paint do - beside re-inscribing their wealth by leveraging technical prowess and labor time. The attention paid to objects as things of their own intrinsic, post-human, value is unnerving, an uncertainty created at how we relate to our world, everyone is only ever both a mirror and an object, do you see yourself?


See too: “Being Thing” at Centre International d’Arte et du Paysage & Treignac Projet

Erika Landström at Federico Vavassori

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Fatigue of "provisional painting" against its inability to die symptomatic of its comfort. The fragment projecting inconclusiveness. Allowing a build your own aesthetic adventure of possible completions, denying the definitiveness whose edges we could possibly find distasteful. Placing information on the table. "You complete me,": a surer sign of attraction. It's nice to know a painting cares about you. Not to instruct you, but be with you. Friendliness in painting. This is all on you.
It's that prophylactically-sexy glass wall behind you that's the scary thing.


See too: “Seven Reeds” at Overduin & Co. , Tony Conrad's Glass,

Riccardo Paratore at Federico Vavassori

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The filthy chairs serves to underscore the asphyxia of the room's hermetic vaccum, sucked of air. The leather is the naked rotting thing in a room of suffocating elegance. Like the beautiful and naked prostitute on the floor of the penthouse, to touch.

Kaspar Müller at Federico Vavassori



It’s Zobernig tar+feathering, Julian Opie’s picto-programmatic brand, and other iconographies existing in unplaceable cultural memory. But whereas Zobernig’s genericism was a deflecting form of critique, maquettes for his fictionalized art theater, Kaspar’s direct thefts of institutionalized styles is a reflexive and perforated form of identity, accumulating a piecemeal version, forming a pile of identity rather than a package, to be sifted through rather than consumed, objects which will never become whole. The new puzzle form of art’s conceptuality.

See too: Jana Euler at Kunsthalle Zürich , Annette Kelm at Gio Marconi , Heimo Zobernig at Petzel, Krupp, Mudam , Matthew Cerletty at Office Baroque