Nazgol Ansarinia at Raffaella Cortese

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Fragments, parts separated from their lives, they always seem beautiful, alien. They seem wounded, ominous, their meaning is fractured, in ways that can't be put back together. We place these objects to our foreheads and ask for their secrets, contemplate their use, rotate them in our minds. But this was their use, to be pressed to foreheads, interminably silent, hear the ocean in your head. 

Fredrik Værslev at Gio Marconi

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"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

Svenja Deininger at Collezione Maramotti

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Because it seems what we are actually pushing around on the canvas is the cultural object of painting. The canvas, support, oils, were long ago replaced by this mythos, the actual material, its signifiers, significance.


See previous: Marlene Dumas at Zeno X, Julie Beaufils at Balice Hertling

Mario Schifano at Gio Marconi

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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

Peter Fend at Museo Nivola

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Art has been co-opted for worse things than environmental boostering. Fend's utopic aspects seem nice if not necessarily utilitarian, but since when has art been confronted with actualities. Art is a space without expectations of internal success, of even internal logic. Fend is capable of a grin, the plan involves "collecting hydroelectric energy with [...] waterwheels suspended from Duchamp-model bicycle-wheel forks." At best giving the boring problems of our coming environmental cataclysm at least ostensibly interesting solutions. Like Buckminster Fuller, and perhaps Obrist, ideas are less the feasible-solutions-for-actualization than they are acts of branding and dissemination, where being excited-for is itself the solution. Whether or not you feel excited is yours.


See too: Peter Fend at Embajada, Peter Fend's World Beach Party (Arts Magazine)

Gerold Miller at Cassina Projects

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This belongs to a genre, "Problems in painting" which we could trace through a legacy of modernism and concerns with flatness, frames, and for-art's-sake to today's endless ways to begaze your navel, painting. Weren't Stella's black paintings just navels-en-abyme. Torture in the ontologic sense.  Painting for painting's... what? How many ways can Dr. Frank reassemble the corpse and we still call it painting? I say this as someone who thinks Jo Baer is criminally underrated. It's perhaps one of those weird quirks that it cannot be just that the problems are interesting, the answers unfortunately have to be too.

Darren Bader at Franco Nero

Genoveva Filipovic at Federico Vavassori

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The scatlogical undertones of most painting goes unremarked, its primordial stuff, energized by libido, as dirt suspended in goo, as some form of infantile creation, of selling dirty diapers.
"It would be an interesting history correlated, the desublimation of painting, its id-ification, from the surrealist's subconscious to Pollock's becoming "nature" to finally the triumph of neanderthalism (of say Joe Bradley) the history of men's important doodle and the mythology of the infantilized artist. We must care for him, them, genius whose diapers we exchange."
Filipovic's "toy with the white cube’s capacity to render a pile of [brown stuff] expensive." according a Frieze review of her Vilma Gold show. Not even Shimizu's were this shitty even when expressly painting it, and people eating it. But provisional crappiness here seems the point, the reverse digestion of painting's normal sublimation turned to shit.

Oliver Osborne at Gió Marconi

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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

Luigi Ontani at Massimo De Carlo

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The "hypertrophic imagination of the artist".
The excessive [...] breeding monsters, unnecessary invention, a bit too. A hangnail bleeding the excess of art, much.

Amelie Von Wulffen at Gio Marconi

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"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.

Augustas Serapinas at Basement Roma

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The gallery's neighbor is pet groomer. And neighbors and previous tenants are sorta what Serapinas seems into, using neighbors. Past instances include a locksmith's keys melted into sauna buckets and curtain rings, as well as a neighbor's pen getting into into some bread. In behaved conceptual art fashion is engorges its signifiers with a vitality, allowing the life of writers and press to extrapolate until a blue that's on brand. But this exhibition is much funnier as a literal attempt at represenatational act, attempting to see through walls and well envision the neighbor that everyone writing think-pieces about how we are so disconnected from. A gallery exists next to a pet groomer. Wipe enough fat on the walls and eventually they becomes transparent. People like to see their neighbors in themselves.

Haegue Yang at Fondazione Furla

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Decorous displays of the mass produced, of the stuff clogging transaction's pipes hung like Christmas trees to capitalism. The store catalog was admittedly her bible and "abstraction" the presentation of it. Abstraction doesn't seem to precisely describe Yang's compositionalization of mass market crap. Unless "abstraction" is taken to mean some form of Marxist fetishization, that these might simply be ugly abscesses of global labor displayed for "abstraction." Like trophies to capital. People make those blinds, handle those bells.You can buy any amount, fill any space, the labor is liquid. The skins of people's sweat hung up.

Jim Lambie at Franco Noero

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Lambie's whole deal an extensive search for excuses to put garish colors in rooms that don't need it. Like dressing in blaze orange to a dinner party, saying look how "fun" one is but also simply look at him. Not entirely convinced of the need for arbitrary splashes of color as a proxy for fun. A dog at the same dinner party adds a splash of color onto the living room rug but at least his is an act of institutional critique. In this metaphor the dog is Martin Creed. But so, Beautifying the world isn’t reducible to slapping down a coat of color. Despite what public art projects would fund. Nor is it plunking a sculpture onto the lawn of gleaming corporate towers, or your Hamptons home. A fungus on noble corn type lysergic. Literalized here by chaining dyed fabric swatches to the walls. Sunglasses as stained glass. The world filtered through rose-colored lenses of Hippies' attempts at profundity, rosy retrospection, each one these things are like a question: remember fun?

Anthea Hamilton at Kaufmann Repetto

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The armpit always seemed like a place where god got a bit lazy. A sort of hole patched with the divine equivalent of Bondo, a sort of universal goo, leaving one wondering if body builders or gymnast armpits are an equally sponge material. God's conceptual flab. Like when Searle called the butt one of design's more embarrassing moments, but Pesce's bum wasn't embarrassing, though maybe a means of forcing embarrassment and mockery to those prudish and uninterested in humanizing an aperture, entryway. The butt was more like design's armpit, a confusing gendering of spaces, giving them a little but too much "body,"  that Anthea's interest seems more in line with in the in-between and confusing spaces of humor seriousness history and whatevers, closest to maybe Nauman in the ability to "teeter on knife point" between irony and earnest, a sort of conceptual flab of reference.

“Fantasy is a place where it rains” at Fanta Spazio

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Framed to the architecture rather than aligned to the artworks the document appears as looking off into some middle distance, gazing longingly out, some sea out there. The photograph looking at nothing in particular embodies your own moments interiorly lost and stuporous, half-smile leaking under your unfocused eyes, capturing all the air and aura of the gallery like a wreath.

Arthur Jafa at Sant’Andrea de Scaphis

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You only get to watch ten seconds of this but you still get feels its promotion. That advertisement creates a lack that can only be fulfilled through consumption it does not allow.

You can watch one whole minute of it here: “Elements of Vogue” at CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo

Jason Dodge at Franco Noero

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The great garbage patch:

see too: Chadwick Rantanen at Secession, Kahlil Robert Irving at Callicoon Fine Arts, Melvin Edwards at Daniel Buchholz, Nancy Lupo at Antenna Space, “May the Bridges I Burn Light the Way” at STANDARD (OSLO), Nancy Lupo at Kristina Kite & Yuji Agematsu at Miguel Abreu, Dylan Spaysky at Clifton Benevento, Yuji Agematsu at Real Fine Arts,  Yuji Agematsu at Artspeak,

Karl Holmqvist at Sant’Andrea de Scaphis

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On Holmqvist at GBE: "It's punk plagiarism, sucking out the affective lyricism of the pop ecosystem to flatten out all those very-much-felt feelings into a poetry of surfaces - and tedium."
  - Andrew Durbin TzK

We like words, we trust words, our whole society practically predicted on words, everywhere, ubiquitous, magnificent and fragile. So the Holmqvistic hammering of words into tin for his cymbal tapping repetition could feel either charmingly disruptive or cruel.  Holmqvist has expressed less affinity for jazz than for noise, words become the sensation of objects felt with a numb hand, the cacophony of nerves deprived. A rose is a rose is a rose, there is a long history of this use of semantic satiation: the repeated arousal of a specific neural pattern causing "a reduction in the intensity of the activity with each repetition" - effectively numbs like our hands our ability to perceive them with any force but some wide flat plainness, deprived of structure to give its words lifeblood like sucking nitrous from balloons until the world dissolves into a stupefied vertigo, and we feel the noise, the static of our brains deprived.

Caroline Mesquita at T293

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The PR mentions Giger for whom the mechanistic and biomorphic found waypoint in the skeleton, the complex curvature of the arthropod's organic exo-shell, the crabs and muscle cars who share the PVC fetishist's interest in shiny bulges; it wasn't hard a move to the erotic. And like the Iron Giant for beyond parental guidance suggested, we can anthropomorphize steel so long as it reflects our own curvature: what looks like a wormy finger in one starts to look in another like a butthole. Metal is as malleable as you want it to be, can conform your desire, and thus have no issue identifying our own corporeality with metal. It's when we go on T293's website and look at the additional photos there and realize the butt's hole contains a jagged and unformed hangnail like a fishhook that we reject its allure.


See too: Roger Hiorns at Annet Gelink, Roger Hiorns at ELI Beamlines Center,