Raimer Jochims at Jacky Strenz

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Like rock tumbler jeweling its stones, Jochims smoothes his. A simple process, wiping away the rough, a polish, revealing pools. Dumb rocks become gems. Why we like polished rocks, that is a good question.

See too: Raimer Jochims at Jacky Strenz (1), Raimer Jochims at Jacky Strenz (2), Raimer Jochims at Jacky Strenz (3) 

Lynne Cohen at Jacky Strenz

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The dryness of black and white documentary photography becomes a deadpan. Something you can't quite call comedy. But might. That same small twist of sense. Sometimes the world doesn't acquiesce to staid photographic capture; sometimes the world seems to sort of fight back. Seems too absurd for its clinical silver. Cohen seems to seek out these moments.

Lea Von Wintzingerode at Jacky Strenz

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Despite the depths of figuratives that we're in, rare to just be painting someone. Like an actual person. The painters using people's bones to hang or inflate abstraction. (We're abstract enough aren't we.) But here reminiscent of Quintessa Matranga's toilets. Just painted. Maybe paradoxically by inventing characters you have to actually paint that person. You don't suddenly have an excuse to throw paint at them, rearrange their features for your whims.


See too: Quintessa Matranga at Freddy

Raimer Jochims at Jacky Strenz

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Against Jochims' more splintered or fractured here is an exhibition of sculpture looking more digested. There is analogy to be made in the sculptor as an intestinal tract: Freed from the structure and striations of skeletal muscle that once predicated historical (figurative) sculpture, the smooth muscle sculptor digests like an intestinal tube that is artist's erosion in time. Time is tube in this metaphor.  Time over the open touch of just rubbing, frottage until the rocks are tumbled to our gratification. Smooth muscle occurs mostly in the gut, uterus, walls of blood vessels, bladder, sphincter, etc.- the body's transit tubes - and these sculptures look like the things those organs produce: turds, early fetuses, blood cells, kidney stones. Things warmed in the gut of the artist.


Raimer Jochims at Jacky Strenz (1), Raimer Jochims at Jacky Strenz (2)

Raimer Jochims at Jacky Strenz

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Jewels or portals, the tension-confusion. A faceted sapphire is both; painting a jewel for your wall. Precious stones do have a patient resistance to our looking, and we try to cut them to out will, but the more you polish gems for eyes the further they seem from us.

Raimer Jochims at Jacky Strenz

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The sign/icon that isn't there, and the emptiness stemming from. Shapes generally denotes an object that should be telling us something, instead a vacancy.



Raimer Jochims at Jacky Strenz

AR: Lin May Saeed at Jacky Strenz

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Originally Posted: April 4th, 2016

Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

Lin May Saeed at Jacky Strenz

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Lin May Saeed likes animals, and communicates that by making art depicting animals. Its forthrightness would seem naive if it wasn't so endearing, handing it right to you to care for its fragility. The leafy sea-dragon is actually well protected by its iconic status, symbol of south Australia, but the ocean it survives in bleaches rapidly. Like James Lee Byars or Felix Gonzalez-Torres, the unassuming sign is intertwined with its loss.


See too James Lee Byars at VeneKlasen/Werner, Alejandro Cesarco at Midway Contemporary Art

Raimer Jochims at Jacky Strenz

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That these, like their colors, don't really make sense, an indifference to fitting explicably well within contemporary grey flesh, like glass shard splinters or loose teeth's minor annoyance become ugly terror through small but repeated insistence.