Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg at Gio Marconi

(link)

Getting tired of flower art, all seeming to do the same thing, excess excused. Flowers are their dramatic overage, that's the point, they're sex on a stick. The more pornography the better, when it comes to flowers, there's fields of it, empty like porn. "an orgy of saccharine beauty." So they drip and spray and amass color and form as no other object could handle. You wouldn't do this to your mother's face. But flowers take it. An object absorbing all artistic abuse.

Flowers: “Miranda” at Anat Ebgi & “A Change of Heart” at Hannah Hoffman, Willem de Rooij at Arnolfini,  Tom Allen at Chris Sharp Gallery, Tom Allen at Air de Paris, Tom Allen at Lulu, 

Fredrik Værslev at Gio Marconi

(link)

"The electrified corpse of symbolism." Made to jitter again. Not just flags, stained flags the audience gasps, amazed at the corpse twitching. The symbols already existed, the idea already existed in Johns, but these paintings pull the corpse out for display again. A dead thing. Stare into the abyss, the abyss give back to the theater of your skull: this is called Prisoner's Cinema, a lack of stimulation causes the perception of phantasms. We write 10,00 word essays expounding the ghosts. They're symbols. They point. That's what they do. You perceive a content, like a corpse. But that's not grandma laying there.

See too: Fredrik Værslev at Bergen Kunsthall, Fredrik Vaerslev at Centre d’Art Contemporain Passerelle

Mario Schifano at Gio Marconi

(link)

How many paintings can we peel from the skin of the monochrome and still call them distinct, still able to peel individuals off similarity, like one more rabbit out of the hat, one more clown out of the car. Still claim a new clown, monochrome. The white of Ryman was a constant to show what else was variable, and the monochrome is proof: there will always be something more, you cannot eliminate content despite trying, it will reappear bearing some distinction, some difference. If not merely any marker of its making*, then the projection screen of everything rolling around in the head of the viewer, the Pierre Menard of painting. Interpretation is interminable, invincible.

*These monochromes have a 60s materiality and a painter who "brought a rock’n’roll spirit to the art world .. He drove around Rome in a Rolls Royce and had countless girlfriends, the best-known of whom was the model-cum-actress, Anita Pallenberg, later the lover of both Brian Jones and Keith Richards from the Rolling Stones" making these party painted monochromes.


see too: Sarah Ortmeyer at Chicago Manual of Style, Kaspar Müller at Museum im Bellpark, Seven Reeds at Overduin

Oliver Osborne at Gió Marconi

(link)

Paint like burnished leather. Rubbed, treated. The point is the surface, a shallow pool both lets sight in and reflects us. We can theorize an internality, a subject inside, however privy we are not to it. A surface that warbles in inkblots. A "parsimonious difference." What do you see, what do you project. It's a new type of formalism where content is created then rejected, cancelled by the imbroglio of meaning. A depiction tampered, we stare at. 


See too: Caleb Considine at Massimo de Carlo

Amelie Von Wulffen at Gio Marconi

(link)

"She utilizes the brown hued bluntness of the German palette – a favorite of 18th century genre painters through to Anselm Kiefer – as if it were a genre all its own."

That's pretty good. And one would wish for a listing of von Wulffen's does with color and painting that feel so egregiously like painting trauma, its history of abuses, like that bic pen blue that smears out of the clouds, the eruptions of full ROYGBIV rainbows of colors unnecessary. Painting is filled with horror, the calls coming from inside the house.

Will Benedict at Gio Marconi

(link)

The strong scent of banality, the groan you feel escaping, The alienation these so cherish to conjure, Their hyper-ennui, a dissociation. Desensitization occurring "emotional response is repeatedly evoked in situations in which the action tendency that is associated with the emotion proves irrelevant or unnecessary." Arbitrariness is a terror. You can't even remember what it felt like to be healthy.


Will Benedict at Overduin & Co., Will Benedict at Bortolami

Tobias Rehberger at Gio Marconi

(link)

The European Jorge Pardo, expelling the libidinal into the shiniest vessels of capital, a release all over the walls of the museum, again and again, brightly colored amounts, a real garnish to your museum or home. But the point is to just release. The question "what else?" confirms the redundancy with itself concretized as a neon sign and its implicit answer, it already too. If you enjoy the bedazzled and glitzed, the "fun" and friendly you'll love these mens' jouissance, their maniacal enjoyment of all things glistening and large. It's so fun! "At Giò Marconi the artist surprises with the choice of works: more than 30 differently sized framed works on paper." But its no surprise, drawing has always been that perfect expression of unconscious desire. Drawn up: “'Prejudices against white males (15)' shows a cooked chicken on a plate with bent, spread legs and folded arms, very much resembles a tanned headless reposing woman. Other drawings openly play with political, racial and sexual stereotypes and prejudices: the girl with the protruding bottom upon which she balances sweets and a glass of milk; the man checking the contents of another man’s pants; the all naked girl band which epitomizes every man’s wet dream." 
Such obvious libidinal expression comes already with a second answer, the exhibtion's title, "tous pour les femmes".


see too: Daniel Lefcourt at Blum & Poe

Kerstin Brätsch at Gio Marconi

(link)

The exhaustive potential of pleasure is further and further documented, enacted continuously. Interface - from CNN's talking heads to Matchmaking apps to bus ads - survive on their fittest evolving further adept stimulation of our primitive emotional wiring. WHO says by 2020 depression will be the second most prevalent medical condition in the world. Rats pleasure themselves to death. Brätsch's use of beauty as a deployable assaultive thing, prolific- likely what critics refers to as the artist's "advertising strategies"  - is beautifully exhausting, like our tears forming jewels.


See too: DAS INSTITÜT at Serpentine Gallery, KAYA at Deborah Schamoni, Kerstin Brätsch at Gavin Brown

Allison Katz at Gio Marconi

(link)


Painting a growing diaspora of signifiers accumulates a puzzle, symbol/icons that hyperlink a representation adverse to coalescing immediate overarching identity. The images’ unambiguousness made tense by that directness failing to deliver on its promise of arriving a destination. If seeing was once forgetting the name of the thing one sees, then the icon represents a gaping blindness.

See too:  Annette Kelm at Gio Marconi

Annette Kelm at Gio Marconi



We’re good enough artists today, that we know how it works. Knowing that intentions and value are gained in the circumscribing of a practice, the ability to theorize it, Kelm’s slow expansion (as well as undermining) of her “subject,” produces a knowing game: a continual delaying of the limnable parameters of her practice, producing photographs as hangnails eliding easy assimilation into a theory of the work, impeding understandable relations between the photographs, leaving scrutiny of the photographs themselves which give nothing but a blankness of intention, a formal dumbness.

Like Michele Abeles, or Roe Ethridge, it’s toying with, tickling, photographic ontology, Kelm’s backdrops often “touching” the picture plane, become it, blurring photography with adverts and print, full-frontal compositions suspending a viewer from entering photographic space, forced to look at the surface, the Greenbergian flatness of the photo.
This precocious meta-knowing of the game of art produces a Brechtian alienation or a Godardian-like game that, in the context of its time (Godard's), felt deeply inhuman, ironic, proto-hipster in its frivolous mockery of aesthetic ideals, as Pauline Kael mentions in her review of Godard’s “Band of Outsiders,” but as in time everything fell further towards its level grew to become, somehow presciently, deeply human. My computer’s dictionary even spell-checks Godardian at this point.