Gili Tal at Kunstverein Braunschweig

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When it rains it pours, cruelly, the abject waste of capital. Rain as the whip. Hammering rain. Against windows, against Lichtenstein's mirrors, returned or exhumed from bin of pop trash. "One does win against rain or repetition," says Rancière about the unrelenting bleak of Bela Tarr films. "the incessant rain destroys all. It has not only stiffened the coat he no longer dares to unbutton. It has been transformed into an interior rain, which springs forth from the heart and floods all the organs." A rain that is mass produced, printed by the yard.

See too: Gili Tal at Jenny’s, Gili Tal at Cabinet

Antonio Ballester Moreno at Tanya Leighton

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Tasteful, set to maximum. You could put these things anywhere and you would prepare to be served a longstem cocktail. Like art from a really lovely hotel, hotel art, but maybe a perfect hotel.

Analia Saban at Sprüth Magers

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Making things look like other things with other more culturally cached things all put in the frame of the biggest cache of all, that frame, art. Ostensibly this is meaningful, reweaving signs and myths into themselves, but it feels like doing imaginary math, a premise to simply get us to argue about the answer, which makes the formula appear interesting.

Emanuel Seitz at Christine Mayer & Tess Jaray at Secession

(Christian Mayer, Secession)

Painting becomes an organization system for color. For "painting". Which then work backwards to find the logic, organization system. Which is something like meaning. 

Amelie von Wulffen at KW

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Ghosts in our garbage, [x] in our things. Nightmares in the waste repressed, under the rugs, stuffed into hills, called landfills. Our history. It accumulates. In corners, on paintings. The mud of culture. The brown of painting's history hides a lot; we'd prefer not to remember.

Lucy McKenzie at Museum Brandhorst

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Displays and information, the stuff always embedded in other systems - legal grey areas because the signifier is always a bit ...removed. Inhabited. It's all fake. The painting above left is her own copy of the 2005 original. Which is not a forgery, but it is something. Slippery. In the style of. From which era are we looking. Is this mis-en-scene or are we actors? Who's thought bubble is this. 

See too: Lucy McKenzie at Daniel Buchholz

Michael Armitage at Haus der Kunst

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(Forgive some of the indelicacies on timing; Jana Euler was already Artforumly connected to social realism already in 2012, etc. The oh so spooky Zombies already labeled by 2014, etc. etc. Party's party began years ago. etc. etc. etc.)

Every hypothesis needs an experiment. And so if you see impressionist painting in the next year, know that it was hypothesized here first.

Marieta Chirulescu at Plan B

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Against the stunning orgies of cartoon extremes, a painting that is vague feels like relief. Surrealism becomes the inability to distinguish - to even parse what is and is not content - painting a sponge for it. 

Marte Eknæs at Efremidis & Sam Lewitt at Z33 House for Contemporary Art, Design & Architecture

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(Efremidis, Z33)

Spooky object scary time. Ominous, cold. An emptiness we the viewer backfill with projections for what could be. See apparitions. See ghosts in the machine. Invent spirits in the trees, gods in the heavens that care about us. Artists as shamans show us the way, the truth, the light, the emptiness. 

Tatjana Valsang at Konrad Fischer

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because there is coldness at the heart of big beautiful dumb paintings, a thing that exists without us, the way rocks are fascinating and inhuman. Ostensibly art would be the human ability to create their own rocks, plinths, and means for, but it's still not human's, still not ours, it's still always some nebulous swirling thing that hints at being ours, aromas ours, but its not, its cold, inhuman, spiteful.

Bradley Davies at Clages

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Cartoon pastoral peasantry, and the like. An ever so slight hallucination.

David Shrigley at BQ

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The merch table. Monet on a placement is sadness. But Shrigley on a placemat is acceptable, it was already kitsch. The irony which justifies, lubricates, the trinkets: "ha ha I'm not buying this with seriousness." Somehow it makes buying garbage feel like relief from responsibility for it. 

Hadi Fallahpisheh at Efremidis

(Andrew Kreps, Efremidis)

There was nothing really "new" in Wade Guyton's rocket launch career. The "new" was a false-promise of a new technology for realizing old dreams, a printer for our unconscious. New tech, means, provides a look of promise, of advancement. And Fallahpisheh's more like Tala Madani's, better for its ancient and dumb themes in drawing dark projection screens. This is what drawing is. Old.

See too: Tala Madani at 303 Gallery, Wade Guyton at Academie Conti & Le Consortium, Tala Madani at David Kordansky

Austin Lee at Peres Projects

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Part of the fun of bad painting is learning to love it. Same reason why some people like pictures of gore: to have an authority over the repulse. An enjoyment to finding the next level of trash, a little further to the new bedrock of stupidity. This is enjoyable. Just when you think painting can't get any worse, it gets a little worse. Vertigo in bad taste. Now here we have representations of bad taste. The difference between painting badly and making paintings of bad things. It would seem to absolve the painter, who blames the world for his representation, as if to say, "I am merely the recorder." "Look how well I have painted the dead clown" In the evolution of the dreadfulness in art, is the next step bad paintings that tries to pass themselves off as proficient? Truly awful, yes.

See too: Aaron Curry at Michael Werner

Helen Mirra at Nordenhake

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"As measurements of time and being, the 13 woven pieces capture in yarn the somatic activities of standing, extending arms, articulating hands, breathing, and sensing."

The Marxist commodity fetish was, confusingly named, our mistaken relation to capital's objects as an economic rather than human social relations, it was a concealment: the aluminum clamshell of your laptop being seen as economic product of capital innovation itself, rather than the hand-sweat of laborers distanced beneath gloves. A price tag for a face. Almost nothing is this world is actually automated - everything you touch is hand-made by workers. This separation of our social relations we've so completely assimilated that labor itself returns as a literal fetishism, stitches mark this labor, look compelling, can be brought out onto white walls, as aura, as artwork. Every cheap objects is an equal tapestry. The stitches in time are smoother, hidden. Hold up your child's plastic toy and feel another at its end.

See too: Melvin Edwards at Daniel Buchholz, 

Berta Fischer at Barbara Weiss

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Stuf. Crushed and molded into gangbangs. Not even necessarily organized or compositionalized, more just amassed. The "errancy" here would be against manners of taste, more an orgy, an excess. Stuf itself accrues a byproduct: a quality we could attempt to separate the difference from surplus and glut; exuberance and waste.

Kathleen Ryan at Ghebaly Gallery, Valerie Keane at High Art

Lynne Cohen at Jacky Strenz

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The dryness of black and white documentary photography becomes a deadpan. Something you can't quite call comedy. But might. That same small twist of sense. Sometimes the world doesn't acquiesce to staid photographic capture; sometimes the world seems to sort of fight back. Seems too absurd for its clinical silver. Cohen seems to seek out these moments.

Jannis Marwitz at Lucas Hirsch

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I suppose the thing that keeps Bosch from being the first surrealist is his ostensible belief in some kind of truth to his images, biblical authority. But which the surrealists too -  under a new bible, manifesto - also led a new moralizing order. Maybe you can't paint humanoids and skulls without some small redistribution of sense. Which is why Tarot cards are such powerful meaning creation devices - humans are apophenic machines - seeing sense where there may be none, they create it for themselves. Art comes to resemble it.


See too: Caitlin Keogh at Bortolami

Tony Just at Efremidis

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"Tony Just, for example, makes ironic paintings that are never sure if they wouldn’t rather be transcendentalist paintings." -Mark Prince, Frieze

"It is my understanding that a Rorschach test isn’t so much about what you see, as long as you do see something." Tony Just

Art as a great goose game.

Kaspar Müller at Société

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Because it stirs the pot, ripples the surface of mythos, of art, content. You cannot kill content if you tried because art is baggage, preloaded with a cultural et al. So make it look good on a wall, even toilet paper.


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