Christine Sun Kim at François Ghebaly

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CSK's work had felt less inclined to a gallery than to textbooks, drawings to be handed out at school instead of warehoused in art's jewelry box. They lacked the frivolity of most art by virtue of seeming necessary. They made their subjectivity an object - almost perfect for transmission, memes. Now they slowly lean heavier toward their more elusive and open-to-interpretation means. That plain speaking remains, and all manners of potential misinterpretation surely the point. But there was something so lighting rod about something no one misunderstood, the perfect language for it.

Sayre Gomez at François Ghebaly

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Here the cage bars become less literal. Fencing dissipates into the photographic techniques, a picture's non-focus is a frosted glass wall. A fake palm cell tower, a strip-mall sign: the impediment to a sunset. Homeless encampments censored against full identification. Gomez, is Hollywood's landscape painter with a sigh, using the techniques of tinseltown's advertorial golden era, the quick seduction of airbrushed leg landscapes. But instead of vistas we get cellphone towers. Only the grisly crust gets Gomez's full HD defect.  The stupid vile blackness of an Enterprise car rental sign to match Reinhardt's own. Whether this throwing in your face shit is stupidly cruel or realistic is your personal preference. "But I painted the banality so accurately!" cries the painter of life. "A mimesis so exact it enacts the drear it represents!" Call it antidote to the naive who think Hollywood is the nice part of LA, medicine to those who have never actually stood at Hollywood and Vine, walked that one block south of the restaurants in downtown. Someday this will all be yours, someday this will all be gentrified. Gomez at whim is able to flick his vaseline seduction on or, more powerfully, shut it off. This makes him coy. A gamesman. The paintings giveth and the paintings taketh, Gomez with his fingers. Yes, think Ed Ruchsa, but now words obscuring the view are attached to sign-poles, very realistic, yes, literal, yes. Literalness in all its stupidity is given in all seriousness its hard dullness.


See too: Andrei Koschmieder at Jenny’s, Sayre Gomez at Ghebaly Gallery