Monika Sosnowska at Gisela Capitain

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Totemizing wreckage as an ostensible reworking of trauma - or as the PR calls it, "poetic metaphor" for artifactual images of the "place's" political and social ideologies, remnant of the politics that wrought them  - would feel a bit more genuine if it wasn't so aestheticized by what we could call "the big shiny": its auto-declaration as Art, a gloss and arrangement that no one could mistake. Something had started to call it ruin porn, a stylized violence, like they actually ship the wreckage of 9/11 around to be gawked at, souvenirs of cruelty or imperialism, and often aestheticized. These you get to project your own fantasy disaster movie scene into.

Charline von Heyl at Gisela Capitain

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Von Heyl's paintings are striking, like being struck, designed with the force of icons and logos, instantaneous recognition, the paintings connect with a speed prophetic of the contemporary and understandable that her rise delayed would coincide with that of digital networks: von Heyl's paintings turn composition into a kind of semio-transaction of consumption, a painterly recognition that is particular, depleting, and manic. Like scrolling through a feed. Von Heyl is one of the few painters (image makers) seeming to understand and frame what it feels like to look at (consume) images today, emptying.

Barbara Bloom at Gisela Capitain

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Scenic tableaus hyperbolize Fried’s theater, nature morte objects not only presupposing the viewer, but enact an uncanny world referring back to the “owner” of. Decor projects its owner formulated projection of themselves, any interior decor a statement made, we are watching but being watched in our assessments of its making to impress, fabricate, a psychology within them, and so Bloom presents domestic psychology to us as a surrogate, a replicant theater. Yet, the odd design decisions, like hovering chairs, have no answer, no owner to ask, no “decorator” and force the question upon the viewer, all but placing a pane as the fourth wall, hermeticisng and tinting this strange act of display in the grey light of Kubrick.

See too : Allan Mcullom at Petzel