Gina Folly at Centre d'édition contemporaine

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The box's abundant metaphor, the gift, vessel, the transfer, a waste, a stuf, that nests a possibility. The box is capital's egg. Delivery, birth, of sexually selected commodity. The humble cardboard box makes our Amazonian wishes possible, you can conjure Christmas from a phone, it arrives in box. What is painting but a box? Its material is useless in comparison its higher order of content, to the gift of painting. A body that dies, but whose spirit remains. (See too: Sarah Rapson at Modern Art) An excess of cardboard population, no recycling center can handle. A dystopic grin printed on every one. Which becomes here's sentiments printed like a seance to the ghost, the ether, the big thing undelivered. 

Liz Craft at Centre d'édition contemporaine, Geneva

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Craft's investment in our emoji-ification - the way we relinquish representation/communication to symbols and mannequins. Yellow orbs to replace us, pareidolialy, trash compose face. It's easy and we're good at it. That we identify with the dead eyes of Ms. Pac-man. That speech bubbles can shrink wrap anything. The frame explain its function, even when there is none, it comes flooding, like a painting. We will always see something in them, singing signing. 

Liz Craft at Real Fine Arts, Liz Craft at Jenny’s

James Bantone at Centre d'Art Contemporain

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"Plainly, Bantone is refusing the identification of your subjects and thereby refusing their exploitation." 

Perhaps similar to Pope.L tensioning a joke without the relief valve of a punchline, instead airs uncomfort - Bantone's horror is actually mere refusal to assimilate with a more gentle color. It's obvious but armor against normalization always is, always needs to be? 

see too: Pope.L; “Beyond the Black Atlantic” at Kunstverein Hannover (Sandra Mujinga), 

Olivier Mosset at MAMCO

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"Erotic sexual denial is the practice of refraining from sexual experiences in order to increase erotic arousal and/or tension. The prohibited experience can be narrowly or broadly defined and banned for a specific or indeterminate length of time depending on the practitioner. The experience withheld can be any favored or desired activities, such as specific acts or positions, provided it is something the practitioner wants. Erotic sexual denial is commonly used as sex play between intimate partners, but it can also be indulged in as an individual practice."


See too: Olivier Mosset, Karin Sander at lange + pult, “Seven Reeds” at Overduin & Co.

Giulia Essyad at Cherish

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Between libidinal corporeality on one end and cybernetic dislocation of consciousness on the other. Between concrete cake and blue screen fantasy. Between touch and imagination. The gulf between and its discrepancy we're all trying to currently deal with.


See too: Juliana Huxtable at Reena Spaulings, Materialphilia

Davina Semo at Ribordy Thetaz

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Exercises in the statue-ization of materiality, to cast the lumpy is shiny permanence. It is at once a romanticization of the material world (which must be made monument) at the same time it treats it like a virtualization, as if you can clip out little sections of the world and freeze them with injections of liquid metal. I interminably think of the butterfly scientist, the artist who preserves his beloved by killing them. Isn't it enough to just play with clay, dough? Do we need to press them into coins with titles and dates beneath them?


Materialphilia

Mai-Thu Perret at MAMCO

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Painting is the ultimate art commodity but these still feel like the commodes of home catalogs and design-porn magazines. Souvenirs of a high-end experience. Perhaps Perret predicting the craft object trends. The pottery on everyones shelves. The neon signs somehow trending in summer cottages. Perret originally created a narrative of a fictional utopia which "produced" the artworks. Which is all the funnier since the trends that look like hers all premise themselves on the selling of hopeful futures, the crafts we will all already be acclimated to post-apocalypse, raku firing our dreams. Perret eventually got rid of the utopia fiction, and then they became just art, much less utopic.

Zak Kitnick at Ribordy Contemporary

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in line of Sears' full history and its intersection with Kitnick's own, for the then pouring into the Jello molds here which will contain it like good art objects as retainers for stories, no longer looking at the art but the little vacuous middle distance of. Objects don't exist anymore is the point, we have post-Marxed them to oblivion with fetishization into names as placeholders: at the end "Craftsmen" was merely an object containing all the distant echoes of its storied history of quality to coast on as its final form as junk wringing out this nostalgia as cash pyres (the story of many brands narrative arch from triumph to trash, Schwinn, Smith & Hawken, et al.) - which seems, Kitnick ever the melancholic, the point, "the highest score for both 'Brand Expectations' and 'Trust'" is more capitalistically leverageable than any use-value or beauty that these artworks portray themselves not as having but ostensibly able for you to take home and create yourself, again trading the ghosts - here the history as press release - we survive on, to do it yourself pal. Defeatist or just powerfully unhappy is what is at stake.


see too: Kyle Thurman and Zak Kitnick at Parapet Real Humans, Zak Kitnick at Clearing

William Leavitt at MAMCO

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For many, it's important, a film's believability, the story's ability to maintain its dream-thrall and for its duration become real, its objects become realized. We understand fiction as able to - even momentarily - become actual. And in Leavitt's work seeing false things we know have the power to become real is its humorous anxiety. The various distances from "realness" are its multiple punchlines, as far from realness as the the science lab on view and we can still understand our ability to believe in them as signifiers of science lab.  At the other end, like Guillaume Bijl, the stages are hyperrealist with question of at what point are the arrangements decor and at what point it is the thing it represents, i.e. authentic living room or staged, is the obvious question, the answer is that all living rooms are. At what point does our decor function as a reflection of society and at what point do our living rooms produce their own image for Hollywood and your neighbors to reproduce, and at what point does suspension of disbelief just become permanent.


see too: William Leavitt at Greene Naftali

Pentti Monkkonen at Truth and Consequences

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"Blanks" is a production term for a material partially formed that has yet to receive whatever finalizing process will finish it, painting, milling, etc. The blank receives all type of process and treatments. The work formed work yet unfinished. They then recieve the processes of production, for Monkkonen the individual sign systems at play, the quasi-readymades applied the blank of painting. Monkkonen who has obviously been playing with painting as product for some time. The bug splatter, like the expressionist's before it, becomes the interpretable tea-leaves of the painting, the same as the cell-phone roach and patterning: signifiers that perform the interpretable content of "Monkkonen." Again treating painting like a blank, a material for production, vessels.


See too: Pentti Monkkonen at High Art, Pentti Monkkonen at Jonathan Viner

Mathis Gasser at Centre d’édition contemporaine

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Like taking sips from a firehose, Gasser's sampling of the deluge of images: "thousands of signs collide and are multiplied in an explosive combination [...] diffracted by the immateriality of the digital world and by the invasion of information. [..] They oscillate between a nihilistic vision and an interrogation of the limits of a world ..." Using of the fountain to make a construct your own adventures storyboard, when the world is flooded dance in the rain.