Richard Bosman at Freddy

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A lot seems to have been made of Bosman's discrepancy of paint and image. People referring to the images as "annoying" and "bad metaphors" and "empty signifiers" and "numbingly stalemated" and maybe closest when Roberta Smith called them "parody-homage". The theme throughout seems that Bosman's "masterfully casual" brushwork would be better suited to more noble subjects. Wanting paint, not subject matter. An uncomfortable understanding that Paint is more noble than this surely. But then already back in 1982 Kate Linker called them "melodramatic tactics," said "Richard Bosman’s scenarios, for example, are depicted with irony, in thick and frenzied strokes which suggest the impossibility of evoking the “authentic” sentiments they once conveyed." Which sounds a lot like today. The affectual torture of signs and pathways, aren't sure how to relate. Like a bad writer pointing out they're closed doors and saying Brechtian.


See too: Andrew Norman Wilson at Futura

Quintessa Matranga at Freddy

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Where water once symbolized the psyche is now our subconscious toilet, our autumnal metal, hellish networks of pipes rusting like our blood, carrying shit beneath feet, behind our faces, our love, diamonds, repressions, whichever. The PR mentions the Guggenheim's storied tubes, queuing turds down pipes while visitors line up for the higher purpose of placing things beneath us. The symbolic paths manifold. The point being: this is no longer the romantic era representing ourselves as fathomless depths; we are now better represented as plumbing: neurons, serotonin, fluids directed, misunderstood as monsters. All plain in Matranga's very unromantic depiction, refusing to state how we should feel about these things except any way but grand.

Joshua Abelow at Freddy

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The wider artworld came to know Abelow through his Art Blog which -coming to prominence against the sterile facade of CAD's hegemony -  felt human, resistant, and no-qualms subjective key to a very specific NY scene, felt warm in reestablishing the local against the global, like grocery co-op charm to Walmart's efficiency. It felt NY again. And as interest increased for those looking for the freshest produce Abelow became, if a not a ringleader, then a purveyor of visibility, a figure of some small access in a scene, that everyone knew, all the while and for like ten years before making scruffy hamhanded paintings that purviewed the doubt of the painter, the doubt morphing over many years, the paintings changing over the course of Abelow's character development from unknown, from entendres of suicide ("HANG ME") to flat laughter ("HARHAR") and as the painter character grew to show himself, to paintings of a man running full speed with his erection before him, to today that same man cloaked in the facade of a powerful witch, and all lovely abstractions along the way, still running.