Richard Bosman at Freddy

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A lot seems to have been made of Bosman's discrepancy of paint and image. People referring to the images as "annoying" and "bad metaphors" and "empty signifiers" and "numbingly stalemated" and maybe closest when Roberta Smith called them "parody-homage". The theme throughout seems that Bosman's "masterfully casual" brushwork would be better suited to more noble subjects. Wanting paint, not subject matter. An uncomfortable understanding that Paint is more noble than this surely. But then already back in 1982 Kate Linker called them "melodramatic tactics," said "Richard Bosman’s scenarios, for example, are depicted with irony, in thick and frenzied strokes which suggest the impossibility of evoking the “authentic” sentiments they once conveyed." Which sounds a lot like today. The affectual torture of signs and pathways, aren't sure how to relate. Like a bad writer pointing out they're closed doors and saying Brechtian.


See too: Andrew Norman Wilson at Futura

Quintessa Matranga at Freddy

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Where water once symbolized the psyche is now our subconscious toilet, our autumnal metal, hellish networks of pipes rusting like our blood, carrying shit beneath feet, behind our faces, our love, diamonds, repressions, whichever. The PR mentions the Guggenheim's storied tubes, queuing turds down pipes while visitors line up for the higher purpose of placing things beneath us. The symbolic paths manifold. The point being: this is no longer the romantic era representing ourselves as fathomless depths; we are now better represented as plumbing: neurons, serotonin, fluids directed, misunderstood as monsters. All plain in Matranga's very unromantic depiction, refusing to state how we should feel about these things except any way but grand.

Joshua Abelow at Freddy

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The wider artworld came to know Abelow through his Art Blog which -coming to prominence against the sterile facade of CAD's hegemony -  felt human, resistant, and no-qualms subjective key to a very specific NY scene, felt warm in reestablishing the local against the global, like grocery co-op charm to Walmart's efficiency. It felt NY again. And as interest increased for those looking for the freshest produce Abelow became, if a not a ringleader, then a purveyor of visibility, a figure of some small access in a scene, that everyone knew, all the while and for like ten years before making scruffy hamhanded paintings that purviewed the doubt of the painter, the doubt morphing over many years, the paintings changing over the course of Abelow's character development from unknown, from entendres of suicide ("HANG ME") to flat laughter ("HARHAR") and as the painter character grew to show himself, to paintings of a man running full speed with his erection before him, to today that same man cloaked in the facade of a powerful witch, and all lovely abstractions along the way, still running.

Albert Mertz at Freddy

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What is left of a Mertz painting?  Blue+red's arbitrary constant - chosen for its particular ugliness - leaves what? Puzzled faces, squares. Ryman or Buren and it's easy to say what we are looking at - everything but the color, everything but the stripes. Mertz it's hard to say. Its programmatic abundance of variables adds up to a wonderful arbitrariness, a sort of magical nothingness, a caffeine-free sugarless Coke.

Keith Mayerson at Freddy

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Mayerson isn’t going abstract. The paintings date over the last number years, mostly 2012, first exhibited together here, and as PR attests some were included in Whitney Biennial’s figure salon.
Mayerson’s proliferating archive of painted images - assiduously maintained on a personal website over a decade of work - swelling over the years, slow roaming among variations, genres, and means, and began pre-Instagram - Mayerson already ascertained the cheapness of the image, in which individuals were trumped by the accumulation and abutment of contents. Each image maintains a content modular in relation to its cohorts, here a full meltdown. An archive of cultural attenuation that, like the Biennial’s recent install, “a non-linear narrative we are asked to complete ourselves.” To become our own detectives of what the gooey form of what his “American Dream”, Mayerson’s, the son of a psychoanalyst, could mean, dripping like clocks, “to channel my subconscious into my paintings and make it ‘real,’” like seeing faces in the wood, like seeing the faces Mayerson sees, like what representational painting represents.

See too : Jana Euler at Kunsthalle Zurich , Jim Shaw at Metro Pictures

Nicholas Buffon at Freddy

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The world rendered in miniature, distant. The signs of the world arranged in a taxonomic grid. Prefiguring action of action figures, scenery in the play we project. MD -> NY, gallery direct. Painted with a teenage aestheticism, pizza handed in Guston gluttony, brushstrokes dragged like feet to get in the car. Distinct Joe Fig’s clever meta game of infinite cleanliness, instead touch rendered, Buffon’s empty streets, and human remnants find a sentimental blowing in the detritus, the world empty, ready for the world’s endless figurants. The facade of the gallery to imagine its inside, the inside everything out, synechode New York. I would like the police car action set please.