Michael Ho at High Art

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The painter's goosebumps, the matte scumbled frission - Oliver Osborne, Nolan Simon, Caleb Considine, Jennifer J. Lee - rough textures through gentle painting - is easy to symptomatize: we desire a materiality to show though vulnerable image, to watermark them with that rarity, the real.

See too: (Matte Representation)

Group Show at High Art

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It's an interesting art history illustration. That what might seem to be recent filters placed onto painting is actually a filtering though, of influence, one that arrives polaroid faded. Not instagram, just physical nostalgia.

see too:Ulala Imai

Maryam Hoseini at High Art

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People bent to composition. A stress positions of beauty. Art's been holding bodies to uncomfortable tasks for forever. Models etoliated on diet coke and fashionable ambitions. Hieronymus Bosch. The garden of hell is scary not because we believe it exists, but because someone imagined it. And really this is painting that demands it, which is just us. Picasso beats his models to a pulp and Jordan Wolfson Real Violence. A trumpet out the ass, regaling. Wine or boiling oil, what difference. Think the Matrix-line virtual plane of painting's imaginative space, where anything can be conjured, and somehow Hellraiser exists, is a franchise. 

See too:Tala Madani, Violence Against Faces

Cooper Jacoby at High Art

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"the surface veneer of this illusion has cracked as it runs up against climate catastrophe, confronting humanity" - great we've cracked the symbolic hieroglyphs. What the PR doesn't answer is why this doomsday is so fucking sexy - there's even a bench to tell you how hot your ass is. But hadn't we just realized global cataclysm was actually pretty fucking banal, refrigerated semis full of corpses just another byline in the inexorable spread of stupidity. This is like the hotrod version, the hollywood version. Lesson:  There is money in making the interior of our doom fun. 

Death Drive Designer: Cooper Jacoby

Valerie Keane at High Art

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We haven't had a Valerie Keane solo since 2016 when formal adventure seemed fun and the garbage was reassembling as totem, content, rococco. (see too: Chadwick Rantanen at STANDARD (OSLO)) In the years since our formalism as gotten less cyber-baroque and more goopy materialist, the photogenic mud wresting which makes Keane's seem chaste. Thing looks different against different backgrounds. And against the ever shifting micro-genres of the last ten years not changing appears new.

Chadwick Rantanen at STANDARD (OSLO)

Bradley Kronz, Jessi Reaves at High Art

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Nice to see these things in a crust of a space. Not the ethereal nowhere of white walls but within the detritus of life, your cluttered lived in home. Objects which remind you of your animal-strapped body in your already bodied halls, your keys in dish and a nasty lamp to echo it. Your life isn't perfect and your artwork won't try and disprove that. The opposite of Muji, Ikea trying to sell you an commodified idea of order, and nor the white walls to aura your disarray as totem, just crust all the way down.

"like all that stolen Ikea elegance whose eventual blown out corners reveal its making of all but compressed trash, underneath everything we desire to be is an intestinal makeup of sponge replacing its weight with rumors of dead-skin and dust-mites of a body threatening to turn fungal"

See too: Jessi Reaves at Bridget Donahue

Matt Copson at High Art

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"It was when watching footage of one of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon concerts, that Copson noted how the stadium rock-scale laser animations that the band were using rendered the entire space around them into a void. The impossibly sharp light of lasers, which literally cut through the darkness like so many knives, are powerful enough to command our attention from miles away, and when the figure made of such sheer brightness addresses us, it is as though they communicate a message from a different plane. In modeling that contrast of light and dark to create archetypal animated animalia, Copson has identified the contemporary moment’s perceived darkness, and within it a groping search for ghosts, universal truths, faith and spirits. His animations allow us the brief sensation of meeting a form of liveliness that has a longer duration than brief human lives: the supernatural, the ancient spirits, the gods, cut through time and space to shatter the dark."

"a satirical but luminous cave-like universe, richly nourished by Western cultural references – from the mythological promethean fire to the biblical beginning of humanity. If – as in Plato’s allegory of the cave"

"Here are the angels in the painted sky; here are the soaring arias, the rays of light."

Lucy Bull at High Art

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Psychedelia; Google deep dreams of Kahlo's flowers. Vulvas like volcanos, magma, geologic surveys. Abstraction was once "what you see is what you see" until what you saw became convoluted, full of hallucination and sexual. The press release says as much, and is good to admit as much, our complete return to surrealism. With better psychoactives. Surrealism works for today as art must be a fount eternal, and so the point today is to overlay as much as information as possible, until it blurs, slips, make inkblots with lsd.

"The boringness of Google's "Deep Dream" project was in making explicit the pareidolia latent, [what was] hidden in carpets and noise and threatened distrust in seeing, those momentary misrecognitions and ghosts in corners. Humans are apophenic machines - made to "see things." The inkblot innuendo was an essential of abstraction that was far too impure for post-war painting to deal with: it would have limited abstraction to the mere human, like Cecily Brown's meaty innuendos, very untranscendent in an era when people were throwing around the possibility of universals. Op-art was a cheap imitation of the purer form's sanctity; Op-art rested on physiologic parlor tricks of biological mechanics rather than the more strict and thus universal forms of abstraction that could communicate with dolphins and gods."

see too: Larry Poons at Michael Jon & Alan

Dena Yago at High Art

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"the ancient ritual of making an object of basic utility for the purposes of transparent exchange begins to promise relief. The commodity in itself offers a level of commercial purity that feels, to some, less complicit or exhausting than the highly mannered and baroque tapestry of brand narratives and leveraged networks on which creating and exhibiting even traditional forms of contemporary art—like paintings, sculptures, or photography—have come to rely. "
https://www.e-flux.com/journal/82/133913/on-ketamine-and-added-value/

Keith Farquhar at High Art

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Content you apply as a paint, or collect like a grime.  Kin Henrik Olesen's stuffing filth into crevasses (and hair adhesived among else) art's usual conceptual pyrotechnics are given abject gloss that prevents our usual cerebral distance, a sterility requiring less iMac than latex gloves. The humor is less punning than sexual, painting in need of laundromats, content viral, wash basins, outlets smeared with paint. The fear of the Kristevan abject is less the fear of repulsiveness than the fear of it becoming-you, nearing you-ness, we fear getting it on us because we fear its indistinguishability between us, and Farquhar's continual covering of everything with everything else spreads the fear that we could get some painting on us.


see too: Keith Farquhar at Cabinet, Henrik Olesen at Cabinet, Henrik Olesen at Reena Spaulings

Aaron Garber-Maikovska at High Art

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An alchemical blend of "dance, tai chi, sign language, and obsessive compulsive disorder" would seem a question the PR tries to answer of why they look just like "Cy Twombly, Joan Mitchell, and Brice Marden" a look that could be said to "situate his work within recognizable trajectories of abstraction," but that "it is not necessarily about borrowed legitimacy" - having now amassed the most common criticisms (besides markets we don't speak of) that many have stockpiled as problems against these- but then offering the solution: that these suggest that "for all the codification that takes place in culture, the essential lies in and just beyond our finger tips, in and beyond language, in the incommunicable." It's an interesting challenge to attempt their defense.

Tom Humphreys at High Art

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A man bent over looking deep into his own anus to find in there a mirror.
Remember as schoolyard kids holding your breath until you passed out as a form of primitive pharmacological entertainment? That's sort of the experience of Humphreys' paintings and sculptures here, deprivation as pleasure. The directness of image construction - why belabor? While others in the circle have moved into production endeavors or installation, Humphreys' has almost doubled down on the crude plaintives. I appreciate this.

Olga Balema at High Art

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In other words - images, unable to be tactile, an inability to make sensuality palpable irrupts strange fetishes: pornography must materialize its sensitivities by finding visual equivalents for touch. Textures which express similar reactions in viewers. You see it in taut inflated anime breasts, shiny PVC covered genitals, leather, sheers, frill, an entire wikipedia article about "breast physics." The ornate knots of bondage are totems to the practice. Art too in attempts to manifest materiality in what that cannot be touched must adopt hyperbolic visual equivalents. Bodies that photograph well.


See too: Olga Balema at High Art

Olga Balema at High Art

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Like grubs mating, the touch of moist plastic, people with fetish for balloons rubbing: there's a materiality present in the touch of latex forms, of stuff touching. Rub the vinyl, feel the taut leather naked and plastic man. Our touch, now more than ever, comes from sight, comes from packages of it in the high definition of images and advertising, we feel through sight, like pornography learning new sensuousness through seeing it commodified as objects, sexy.


See too: Olga Balema at Croy Nielsen

Pentti Monkkonen at High Art

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The package as product, medium masseuse, the vessel which projects its internal object, which here isn't anything, instead the subject of art, the artist.

There's been a lot of liquor art of recent. Box and buildings too. and of course the eternal art and smoking.



Gina Folly at Ermes-Ermes
Pentti Monkkonen at Truth and Consequences
Pentti Monkkonen at High Art
"Paris De Noche” at Night Gallery
Pentti Monkkonen at Jonathan Viner

Valerie Keane at High Art

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The capitalist equivalent of bodied-objects coughed up in the night, the night terrors of Haegue Yang shopping spree, they assemble the technologies of display that here become streamlined, spined, and injectable. Sharpening the garbage of post-ford CNC driven custom-ordered world, the grosser parts of the capitalistic buffalo, amassing the plastic neurosis that gives men breasts dissolved into micro-slush of our eco-systemic foodchain: we have plastic fears. And all the sharp points here remind us like swallowing jagged metal Krusty-Os of the possibility of bodily harm on all those sharp points against our bodies. Inverting Genzken's blind-beautiful speed of production to engender the nightmare of its waste. A real nightmare.


See too: Isa Genzken at David Zwirner, Yuji Agematsu at Real Fine Arts, KAYA at Deborah Schamoni

Max Hooper Schneider at High Art

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The decrepit Casino cut and parted out and distributed as a future predicted will speak to a fantasy of our gothic present amplified. The heavily floraed aquarium holds the lush world behind the glass screen of those surfing having fallen in. The web is like a very deep aquarium and there will be neon signs underwater, in glass. Whole fantasies behind glass, Disney World behind glass where 20,000 leagues under glass a squid would attack your submarine. From sentient watermelon to primordial hot baths, the Chuck-E-Cheese Animtronics begin horribly signing a new dystopian that is lush.

A continuation of: Ajay Kurian at Rowhouse Project

Pentti Monkkonen at High Art



Monkkonen's box-trucks literalize the metaphor: painting as commodity vessels in transit. What were rectangular become parallel grams sent for accelerating markets. The vessels are moving fast, the trucks skull cab and silver toothed grill portend their too-fast-too-young market crash. The flow of brand. Graffiti, produce, logos, brushstrokes, artistic identities all competing for recognition.  Like many interested in the cheap plastic promise of fantastical playthings, it is found perfectly in the toy-form’s commodic pleasure whose projectable fantasy's complete dissolve of use-value mirrors art’s ostensible own. That like childhood figures of action, producing their jism all over town to heroic ends, painting an identity placed over a muscular blank, the vessel, creating a subject.


 See too: S.O.A.P.Y III at What Pipeline ; Mathis Altmann at Freedman Fitzpatrick

Rachel Rose at High Art



Another render-stentialist fresh out Columbia somewhere between Trecartin and Atkins. So infatuated in the surface exhibiting the plasticity of a world in higher-definition than our own. The video is endlessly manipulative, bending in blitzkrieg assault of sudden weather, like phone phreaking surface effects of our emotive connection, they play like enchantments into us ecstatically, eroding any affective links with what is seen, hyper numbing, leaving the viewer estranged, cold as the real is endlessly manipulated like weather you can turn on and off.

see also: Ed Atkins - Render-stentialists