Fredrik Værslev at Bergen Kunsthall

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Continuously amazing, Josh Smith's ability to produce a tasteful painting today. And Værslev too an incommensurate tastifying of painting identities smoothed and well worn into comfort: the softness of acid-washed history, whose untreated denim is stiff, abrasive, and has edges that Værslev happily washes away, with the already pre-distressed historical material. Gerberian friend support is made as a kind of joke, of painting "off-the-shelf," readymade and there's a story Værslev tells in interviews, of the shelf origin in which in his final moments at the Städelschule, and tormented years since his last paintings -"for three years and a half I did not paint, not a single drop of paint" - and encouraged heavily by professor de Rooij, he makes a painting to his (Værslev's) mother's specifications: useful and pink with a shelf for her flowers to prevent stereo ruination and does so, paints the pink shelf with the flowers, and this success deemed by professor student and ostensibly mother seems an apt in describing its continuation today meeting demand for a market, giving the people what they want, a comfort.


See too: Fredrik Vaerslev at Centre d’Art Contemporain Passerelle

Fredrik Vaerslev at Centre d’Art Contemporain Passerelle

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Theft. Blankness. Everything in the exhibition is "found," you’ve got Heimo’s appropriation of its fostering institution’s identity graphics printed on Mosset’s beige pyramid repetition, indeterminate vacuous stripes, and any of the number people who accumulate smudges, all across the canvas, each in a quadrant to Vaerslev’s abstraction. There is no trap set, no one is going to “read into” these, only conceptual fracture of others moves loaded onto a canvas to re-package it as virtual corporate franchising, "surpass[ing] the restricted area allowed to abstract art in the program of modernity" everything stolen and printed. A race to the bottom in derivative deflection en abyme. Not so much preferring not to, mass producing it.

Seven Reeds at Overduin and Co., Group Show at Greene Naftali, Flame at 576 Morgan Ave Apt 3L,

“Seven Reeds” at Overduin & Co.

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As others have extrapolated, Kassay’s silver market stardom was, in the style of ancient plated mirrors, an object of vanity for the rich, giving them back exactly what was loved most, their surroundings, their homes, their empire and visage. To prove the point the more well silvered even reached higher prices. The theory serves as a parable to distinguish the vanity of the rich from the more philosophically noble raisons of the art world, and that Kassay’s shift to monochromes, however derivative, was a welcome advancement past vain ideals.
Yet the monochrome itself is a flattery of the viewer. In its minimalist mode it highlights the theater of its surrounding, as Fried described minimalism almost half a century ago:

“theatrical because, to begin with, it is concerned with the actual circumstances in which the beholder encounters literalist work. Morris makes this explicit. Whereas in previous art ‘what is to be had from the work is located strictly within [it],’ the experience of literalist art is of an object in a situation - one that, virtually by definition, includes the beholder.”

Or to quote the infamous monochrome brand of Codax: “ another aspect of monochrome paintings is that they function somewhat like a mirror. They are essentially blanks. With little evidence of the hand that made them, it’s harder to attribute subjectivity to them than with most other art, so people are confronted with themselves a bit more.”
That monochrome or minimalist modes are themselves a vanity object, in which the viewer is flattered for all the intelligence that they can project into the blank objects. Serving to imbue their surrounding, gallery or living spaces with the auratic privilege of “art.” Lacking even Imi Knoebel’s color-content, the works drabness serves to disperse content and reinforce it as its surroundings, its space and viewer on the stage before it, like totems of whatever ideals they allow to be contained. That so much gentle painting today rather than a production of content, merely acts as directives for the flow of content and persons that come to it, trickling through it.

See too: Merlin Carpenter at Overduin & Co.