Sturtevant at Freedman Fitzpatrick

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While the paintings/drawing provided question of what exactly was being looked at, (How did Hainley put it? What remains of a cancellation?) as occlusion of what was Sturtevant. Against this blindness, cancellation, or hole, after her tennis break she returned with a visual maximalism that was so incredibly alluring. Recall seeing the inverted video pyramid at Gavin Brown - throbbing soundtrack lead in - and, mesmerized, watching the entire length of the video several times. What other art film has done that? Creating a gluttony, a casual technical lucidity that made them so consumable, a sugar image. They invoke an amnesia, the feeling of watching television as children, hours passing. Wake up to find yourself having been entranced by a void.

Alexandra Noel at Freedman Fitzpatrick, Atlantis

(FF, Atlantis)

Of the kids today raised on cartoons and adopting surrealism, Noel's slightness is a psychic mess, more pollution than collage, tinged with repression. The shadow of a plane is the specter haunting here, but throughout is an "offness" that is more motion sickness than fear. Like Gertrude Abercrombie, or Goodnight Moon, an unease in desolate scenes in omnipresent sourceless light. Or Ken Price's drawings, his own harsh light of LA, ominous in shadows looking like oil, a lack of light which threatened to become physical thing, ink, creep from the cracks, precipitate from the air, cover everything. Noel's light too, toxic, the haze as permanent fixture, everything feeling smogged, poisoned. Pollution as repression, spectacular sunsets, and black oil beneath feet. The 9/11 in everyone's bedroom.


See too: Gertrude Abercrombie at Karma

Diamond Stingily at Freedman Fitzpatrick

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The transition from handmade dolls to mass produced Teddy Bears had to be meaningful for the unconscious of humanity. All sorts of issues for what it would mean with children grown on loving sweatshop objects. Units of CareBears moved. To move you. Shouldn't the Toy Story characters speak Chinese? Dominant culture gets to force its cast to speak its language, dub them against their natural speaking voice, force adoption of its language. It's called localized for a market. It's called acting white. It's called "he's eloquent." called AAVE, a vernacular nonstandard but "equal." They surely will speak whatever when localized for market. Giving commodities to children so they learn to love their master. Because really they'd speak Mandarin. Klaus Biesenbach's apartment has nothing in it and is entirely white, which is a lie since minimalism is basically predicated on closeting the workers you're standing on, but we'll give him several architectural and NYT magazine spreads anyway, a new advancement in whitewash interiors. Because pretending the working body isn't there, pretending everything spontaneously generates on store shelves clean, without indentured sweat, is important to our culture. Corporate production gets so massive it takes pains to relocate itself, force adoption of itself, anything outside it gets the searchlight, brought back under eye that is pretended as benign with total market share, control.


see too: Melvin Edwards at Daniel Buchholz, Diamond Stingily at Queer Thoughts

Raúl de Nieves at Freedman Fitzpatrick

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Too much decoration is a terrible thing. We call it "gaudy" or "garish" or "lurid" or "vulgar" no longer arranged but vomited in quantity, too much, like the clowns on view who baroque their face to comical levels found frightening, a rupture of the socially decorous. Because these are ethnocentric terms, wielding the symbolic violence of "taste," and such it is rare museums didactic their greek statuary with "this greek marble would have actually been caked in makeup like a whore" preserving both the marble and myth of white antiquity. The myth of white antiquity that believes in the raw lineage that gives us aluminum Macbooks and UberBlack as opposed to the lesser Ubers which come in colors disorganized. Sontag wrote the word camp and it suddenly allowed the intelligentsia to participate in the kitsch with the shield of irony, but if you weren't, if you couldn't, what then if these were just garish.


See too: Joanne Greenbaum at Crone, Olaf Breuning at Metro Pictures

“After Curfew” at Freedman Fitzpatrick

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An adequate press release points out: the kids grew up on Disney, adolesced under its demonstration, force fed a diet of muppets and princesses as if this was normal consumption, and society wondering why people have furry issues today. When are we going to start dealing with it the people ask. After curfew we should be adults, but our children tag along recessed in our closeted heads. Whether or not the PR or the exhibition has anything particularly revelatory to say about the condition - the PR basically stops at diagnosis - is maybe beside the point, no one is sure, really, about the children we have stored and all the attempts to leave them along all their teeth pulled awaiting the Fairy ending, Freedman Fitzpatrick following the Disney chain to their own Disneyland Paris.

Cooper Jacoby at Freedman Fitzpatrick

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Apocalypse fabulous, death drive design for-your-home. Designer military, bio, and technologies. Fashionable. Heat sinks in beehives, or the pollinator wasps we'll use to replace them. Ham-handedry matters little with such sexiness; intentional: they're supposed to look like the high-end commodities that they are. An enviable press release reading like a lookbook for the rich's post-collapse homes. Our world's end, celebrate it with a commemorative lamp, luxury mirroring your wealth's participation in it.


See too: Cooper Jacoby at Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden

Mathis Altmann at Freedman Fitzpatrick

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We've been talking for a while about the model, the physical metaphor of our world's increasing virtuality as it becomes abstracted by capital, computers, etc. Built to code: the blueprints and plans allowing the capitalist's virtualizing the world as its representation.
Recall, Rachel Harrison's screwing of semiological space, objects that felt like suburban malls destruction of good sense. Now the hypothetical of that abstraction entering physical as opposed to semio- space. We become lost in scales, the map now producing the territory, etc. and questions, "From which vantage are we seeing" type confusions so prevalent in Altmann.

But so anyway, Past:

"...The Model becomes predominate as the world's point of scale becomes unmoored, and reality floating between the virtual and material conditions abstracted by floating points of enumeration etc. etc. "Housing" replaces "houses," which replaces "house" distinct from "home," which is bombed out. The model encapsulates this world governed by virtual features, the planning, projected statistical everything, abstraction of everyday..."

      -Mathis Altmann at Halle für Kunst Lüneburg

"...which is why we are seeing them everywhere as sculpture today, proving virtuality always existed: the world abstracted by money, power, plans. The children grown on building blocks eventually see the world as such object... juvenile megalomania grown to find their imagination justified and fueled by capital. Children's fevers eventually grow and sediment as reality... reality as abstraction underneath, toys."

       -Matthew Zivich at What Pipeline

"...staging us as onlookers to worlds as sandboxes. A dissonance between our interior worlds that of course we find increasingly virtual and beholden to our godlike control of drag/drop materiality conjuring our desires that the outer world increasingly doesn't reflect, the world steamrolled at the whim of other's control. So our turning to dolls and miniatures and virtuality makes symptomatic sense, fulfilling our need for control over a world we increasingly seem to not have much over..."

      -“Sylvanian Families Biennial 2017” at XYZ collective

"...The bedroom as terrarium..."

      -Maggie Lee at Real Fine Arts

"...the still obviously recurring theme of the exterior as phantasmagoria: blank surfaces for projection and the psychic cruel comedy of visage as facade. The use of architecture as representing psychic space has become a major motif in art, but whereas it had been usually literary or filmic as physical metaphors for memory or dreams or whatever, art's use has recently become much more concerned with its meaty resemblance to a skull, reminiscent of Deleuze pointing out that Francis Bacon didn't so much paint portraits but heads..."

      -Brian Griffiths at Vilma Gold

"....properly weighted, the iPhones will levitate..."

     -Ajay Kurian at Rowhouse Project

Jill Mulleady at Freedman Fitzpatrick

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The soft colors of today's representation in Absinthe era greens, Toulese Lautrec with modern drugs, ennuis and colors.

Julien Nguyen at Freedman Fitzpatrick

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The unending loveliness of these, that, even we must admit, are good, technically adventurous and ripple with sex. Variance in finish shimmer like veins in marble or cocks, undulating detail as arousal: detail is attention paid, stimulation, titillation. For anyone who ever found eroticism in the restraint and rigidity of Piero della Francesca, here is your proof melting with Althoffian foppishness. These things bruise sex out of their flesh. Paintings with the depth of early video games while retaining the material pleasure of scuzz: a man smeared in choking purple softness, and legs splayed. Get close to his pink hand. There have never been more homoerotic paintings than these.


See too: Julien Ceccaldi at Jenny’s

Amelie von Wulffen at Freedman Fitzpatrick

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Working from comic books and Veggie Tales, von Wulfen's reactionary content not in the figurative - which has always survived as still merely a question of how to hang paint - but narrative painting. Taking care that we actually care what the cherubic nubbins like mangled erasers might be looking at, some lascivious and reactionary content. The work's out-of-dateness used as its cool, espousing traditionalist values.


Peter Wächtler at Reena Spaulings, Vittorio Brodmann at Freedman Fitzpatrick , Sanya Kantaraovksy at Marc Foxx

Vittorio Brodmann at Freedman Fitzpatrick

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Whereas for Kantarovsky style rests on the surface, forefronted and delivered, for Brodmann style is suspended  in the dispersed particles of its past participants, in the soup of its references, closing in on the liquify setting of its blender. Brodmann’s an “artist to watch,” dissolve of the darker edges of his earlier characters into its broth of tasteful painting, put less and less at risk with each show, exchanging the teenage characters for the pastel hues of adult refinement, and these are more refined but lose the uncomfortable sweat of its awkward adolescence heading off to market.

See too : Vittorio Brodmann at Gregor Staiger , Sanya Kantarovsky at Marc Foxx

Stefan Tcherepnin at Freedman Fitzpatrick



Saying "Stefan Tcherepnin at Freedman Fitzpatrick"  is a bit misleading, an oversimplification masking the real transactions. Freedman Fitzpatrick is a social institution, an outpost of a scene importing artists. Berliners understanding the relational survival of arts rosteral trading networks. Give us post-rookie-upswing Tcherepnin we’ll give you our space. Just visit Paramount Ranch for a list of people who are willing to relate. Green Tea gallery, this show’s symbiote, whose real-in-name slowly becoming actually real in finding itself listed in real artist CVs, inverse opposite that other attachment gallery, Shoot the Lobster and their fake artist insertion. Green tea gallery here comes with a whole barrel of fun, With Tcherepnin you get a whole bonus pack, Ei and Tomoo Arakawa, aka United Brothers, (50% more!) and “ invited artists Hanayo, Anicka Yi, Yuri Manabe, and UB Android No. 5 will be featured as a scene in United Brothers’ upcoming installment of the Les Andröides trilogy.” A self-propagating club-house reproducing itself magnificently.

Mathis Altmann at Freedman Fitzpatrick



Altmann inverted his work. What were once beams barnacled in the happy modern-trash detritus - like a more highly magnetized Rachel Harrison, or a contemporary Barres de bois - have been in this exhibition turned inside-out into spherical holes of diorama-like insides, magnetar earths erupting, revealing a cybernetic brain theatre; the gallery itself turned inside out, internal, as if the small spheres contained the negative air of the white gallery space, the clippings on the tarp reiterating the outside/inside mix-up, like is the air in your stomach technically outside of you?
It’s hard not mention Mike Kelley’s Silver Ball, or Altmann’s contemporary, Nicolas Ceccaldi’s toy gun surveillance, and his own past objects but this exhibition runs with those, fueled by the drug of real heavy installionism.
The press release’s assemblage surrealism amplifies the theatricality of the whole thing to levels above reason, a little too indulgent, doing little to parse the actual small strangeness that exists, and instead bludgeoning it with lacking language. We get it dude, cybernetic weenies from venus.