Pierre Klossowski at Bernhard

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Chronicler of Christian psychosexuality, Klossowski perhaps understood what what was happening in the back room, even divined the Catholic sexual abuse scandal. Maybe he, 1964 renewer of the days of Sodom, libertine, participated in it. These paintings weren't that long ago. Maybe he, like many artists, simply saw the rituals and its concerns for body and blood and heavy robes, as inherently erotic, just pushed what was latently there. Like his novels, half the fun is the not quite understanding what is happening, always something more to be unearthed, buried. A lot of watery innuendo; it's between Klossowki's pastel lines. We like Klossoswki for this faint transgression. But these aren't erotic, the PR is right to point out the discomfort in everyone's grave stilted faces, sex unpleasurable.

Max Brand at Galerie Bernhard

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If you rolled a piece of silly putty across the newspaper of Painting's history, you'd have Brand. The paintings are worn, patinated with the accumulated hands of artists, like the graffiti at painting's urinal. Grave rubbings of history, frottage of so many corpses, the accumulated seed some primordial stew whose clean up rag is molding, beautifully, colors. Eventually congealing some fetal cartoon life. Brand's moving away from the neanderthal hamfists of say Joe Bradley puts him closer to Sergei Jensen's vintagification - the washing of fabrics for softness, stains like well-used blankets, the kleenex of history, the teenage folder, everything adolescent, sticky.


See too: Sergej Jensen at dépendance, Ida Ekblad at Herald St, Ida Ekblad at Herald St (1)