Masaya Chiba at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery

(link)

The zany installation needs to make comeback. That science fair exhibit gone wrong of the 90s/00s. Jason Rhoades, Cloaca, Hello Meth Lab in the Sun, Christoph Büchel, etc. Everything looked like a laboratory, an industrial factory, used conveyor belts. Rhoade's PeaRoeFoam predicted the late 2010s process orientated abstraction as a giant comedy - art's industrialized factory of charisma, a caricature of the production of aura. It was also enjoyable. Something about the science fair animates and comedies the ideologic process of art's chambers. The conveyer of viewer, the turtle munching mulch, the paintings aloft, the didactics and visible/invisible arrows. Look here, learn this. "You can sit in this chair." Thanks. That the imprisoned turtle is the stand-in for us isn't even that far fetched, just like Foucault said, society is a...

Trevor Shimizu at Misako & Rosen

(link)

(Someone confirmed, this might count as a water lily. As impressionism. Which is too bad, the prediction is only fun when its suspended... let's say this is post-impressionist water lilies.)

I enjoy late Monet, before his cataracts surgery, the rusting of his pastiche into yellow lumps, all but blind. Their gross mismanagement of color failing to materialize his prettiness. You watch a master, hampered, fail. Late Monet, like Soutine painted a colonoscopy. Shimizu's, ditching the coprophagia, have almost the opposite but equally compelling problem, a prettiness for which there is no reason - you watch failure produce horrible beauty. 

Yu Nishimura at Crèvecoeur and KAYOKOYUKI and Komagome SOKO

(Crèvecoeur, KAYOKOYUKI and Komagome SOKO)

either avoiding or lack a language for the most obvious elements of painting. Or pretend the obvious isn't. Speak to some ulterior, interior, some grand "meaning" just out of sight. Matisse painted incredibly stupid paintings of goldfish, even more of women, but we don't say that; we say, "Goldfish were introduced to Europe from East Asia in the 17th century." A complete non sequitur to painting. We pretend painting is too serious, handled with care. But it is the childlike wonky that is their enjoyment, the complete derangement of "cat" that may be their only fun. Look how poorly I can paint it and still might make you feel it.  But, "poor" is a subjective term masquerading as an objective one, an assessment tool of some biased hoodwink. We don't say that anymore. Which is why this cat looks like a pickle.

See too: Trevor Shimizu

Hikari Ono at XYZ Collective

(link)

"a jejune experiment for proving entropy. Picture in your mind’s eye the sand box divided in half with black sand on one side and white sand on the other. We take a child and have him run hundreds of times clockwise in the box until the sand gets mixed and begins to turn grey; after that we have him run anti-clockwise, but the result will not be a restoration of the original division but a greater degree of greyness and an increase of entropy.
"Of course, if we filmed such an experiment we could prove the reversibility of eternity by showing the film backwards, but then sooner or later the film itself would crumble or get lost and enter the state of irreversibility. Somehow this suggests that the cinema offers an illusive or temporary escape from physical dissolution. The false immortality of the film gives the viewer an illusion of control over eternity—but “the superstars” are fading." -Robert Smithson, "A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey"

Smithson's angst, placing art within the grand scales of cosmic time. This was his hurt. Casting art as mere symbolic regaining control if not return sandboxes to "order." (Smithson obviously believed in confronting geologic time with erections against it, casting spells in landscape.) Besides the fact that Smithson sounds a little bit like a cop here, the grand scales of his cynicism surpasses thinking about comfort, likely because he himself had it, and was rewarded for his soft chair from which to think about things bigger than, because thinking "big" was important then. The disinterested and "grand" aesthetic.


See too: Lutz Bacher at 356 Mission, Lutz Bacher at Galerie Buchholz and Sarah Rapson at Essex Street

Kaye Donachie at Yuka Tsuruno

(link)

The 19th century's joke was painting faces positioned next to flowers and 20th century's joke was painting a face like it was flowers. Now what? A face is just the putty we rearrange in hopes of arranging something like meaning. An endless mine to profit from, our faces. Something we can pump. We're inordinately cruel to ourselves.

J. Parker Valentine at Misako & Rosen

(link)

Lines, they delineate. So, failing to produce the object, the quasi is given to viewer, an inkblot, a form they construct.  "difficult to articulate" the PR says, becomes painting of a mirage, handing the goo to a viewer left to sort spaghetti formed lines like tea leaves in you all along. Pareidolia.

Richard Aldrich at Misako & Rosen

(link)

No matter how much you make fun of these paintings, they just sort of take it, like dummies, bouncing right back up. Painting as a sponge for blows. Perhaps the best painting is capable of all the lashing in the world. Call these paintings stupid. And they are... but they take it exceedingly well, seem even noble in it. Some paintings whither because they fear stupidity.

Vincent Fecteau at Misako & Rosen

(link)

The muscle car was - if by name alone - intended to resemble a body. Exuded the "muscle" it contained, sleek and rippling with. The image seeped into culture and the fast cars took on different appearances, insectoid, technical. But those muscled images remain latent, in the cultural ether, and Fecteau seems to pluck and rearrange some subconscious forms of these chopped and reassembled, looking like something you vaguely recall but can't place. Like a google algorithm trying to invent a car part, like a human recalling some vague sexual attachment to a physical objet before understanding what a body was for.

Nobuya Hitsuda at KAYOKOYUKI

(link)

These paintings are fine. Will we ever see more of them?

Valérie Blass at Oakville Galleries & Atsushi Fukui at Tomio Koyama

(Valérie Blass at Oakville Galleries, Atsushi Fukui at Tomio Koyama)

We aren't normally delivered the fantastical in such explicit forms. That tasteful hint of surreality mirroring our own world feeling deformed, malleable to invisible hands. Things feel pretty strange these days, so much so that fantasy surrealism almost feels quaint, safe. A big ornament in the sky feels relatively benign in that scientists - as a means to cool our planet - are researching global scale "stratospheric aerosol injections" of sulphuric acid. Spraying 5 million tons of acid into the sky as serious funded research, the world has become a cartoon where the actors wields huge mallets, and the world bends like goo to their violence.

Tam Ochiai at Tomio Koyama

(link)

Names, dates, places, things we scour like On Kawara paintings hoping to reassemble and collate some sense from. But the signified, the thing, continuously withdraws. We'll never actually regain or conquer or even know. Names, dates, things are hidden behind the curtain of their signifier and us all looking at blank paintings trying to grasp the thing they have purposely lost behind words for us.


See too: Tam Ochiai at Team Gallery, Inc.

Chim↑Pom at ANOMALY

(link)

We have invented forms of wreckage we find enjoyable.

Lee Kit at Hara Museum

(link)

Sensitivity is a fine distinction away from sentimentality; sentimentality which enforcing its feeling. And wrapped in the fuzz of nostalgia when things weren't recorded in such high-definition. Set your filters to auto-soften. Make it ephemeral. It's ostensibly not-packaged but it is deliverable.


see too: James Lee Byars at VeneKlasen/Werner, Wolfgang Tillmans at Galerie Buchholz, Moyra Davey at Institute of Contemporary Art

Fergus Feehily at Misako & Rosen

(link)

Everyone loves Feehily, they are like a breeze. Against everyone else's returns to modernism Feehily's could seem one more scuzz on the pond to extract any further oxygen from it. Instead perhaps like Raoul De Keyser a mining for some odd uncanny version. There is a bit of adorability to their off-elegance. Paintings like the underdog, we root for them. Like wearing a fur-coat and a runny-nose. "in micro mode: in accumulations of near-subliminal pictorial events that reward an unhurried, particle-magnifying gaze."

see too: Raoul De Keyser at Inverleith House

Aki Kondo at ShugoArts

(link)

All we want is something painted. The ostensible white language of plainness is actually easy means to see the difference, what we're looking for anyway, the subject of painter rendered in the glass they see the object through, the errors of their mis-seeing. No one thinks bananas look like this, but a question of what was finished enough for acceptability here. See the flaws in the glass of another's eyes.

Ken Kagami at Parco Museum Ikebukuro

(link)

Stupidity becomes the vernacular of a world that is so saturated by it, we are awash in it, berated with it, nor innocent of it. Stupidity is to comedy what holding your breath is to drug expanding consciousness, practiced by primitive schoolyard psychonauts. Stupidity cannot be advanced through elegance or profundity, and 3 Standard Stoppages eventually evolves this raft of cranial blockages, an aspect MoMA says "to display the inherent indeterminacy of life." Indeterminacy sorta like stupidity, the big irrationality. Picasso in his underpants. And one way to feel better about the stupidity of the world is be the one enacting it. Allowing yourself to feel at the helm, in control of the thing that berates. "Everyone in the world is acting smarter than me" is a more comforting blanket than what is likely our own opinions on bell curves and self ranking.  Auto-asphyxiation is a common childhood game, and we'd like to believe the stupidity that paddles us stayed those children as well. But the PR assures us that the artist is an adult. It states,"Ken Kagami is an adult." but qualifies this: "but one who has achieved and maintains a childlike sense of mischief and cynicism via the practice of art."  But this is a lie to make us feel better, like he's only play acting, like we're safe, like the adults at the helm are acting rational. It should have just said, "Ken Kagami is an adult."

Miho Dohi at Hagiwara Projects

(link)

Sort of lovely against assemblage's vogue for the abject, bodily, Dohi's like jewelry brazed from trash. Against assemblage's interest in serial speeds Dohi's seem attuned to individual, something so fungal about them, lichens atop autonomous crust. Against the current vogue for assemblage's absorption of all wounds, scrapes, and damage intentionally accumulated, feel fragile, like cripple ducklings we wish to care for because they can actually be wounded.

Nathan Hylden at Misako & Rosen

(link)

paintings were always trying to point elsewhere, reference their previous selves, point at the other, steal brushstrokes from each other, leave sprayed paint ghosts as traces of the other, overlapped and reinserted to another, silkscreened, printed, cut, traced, photoed and industrially processed, continually turning the heads every elsewhere until finally we are looking at the floor - that apparently gave rise to at least some of the paintings - looking for the original that Hylden tries to defeat, burying it under it reference until there maybe isn't, it is dead and in the pile that hides it, a mirrored floor showing something new?

Erika Verzutti at Misako & Rosen

(link)

Material excess, crust, small holes cut in flesh to place tiny stones. Little pimples to pop, nubbins,  to squeeze out excess, or pull an ingrown hair from under tender flesh. Feel bodily presence inside squares. Cut carrots in your belly button. Fill your ears with plastic beads, your salivary glands with pearls, your tear ducts with coral. Connect several puzzle pieces to feel that satisfying soft click. Fill your colon with concrete. Easily fit the average lightbulb's glass end into an open mouth to find it cannot come back out, the skeletal structure of your jaw is one way, leading to a series of horrible wet youtube videos. Remove the concrete to find a sculpture of your colon. How many apples do you think we could fit inside him? Surgically removed hangnails. Ingrown toenails. Rubbing mother's bunions. Rug burn so bad your uncle weeps. Reliquaries of saint's bones. Red swollen earlobes pinned to potatoes. Pizza face leaking. Red boogers wiped on pants. The entirety of childhoods perforations leaving a body like Spongebob. Pumice stones for exfoliant. Cartoon meat like cake. A pound of flesh removed without a drop of blood, just some sensitivity around the glands. I replaced my cheek with a smooth stone.

Tomoo Gokita at Taka Ishii

(link)

You can do incredible violence with a painting, with a stroke you can mutilate. The horror film and the painter implement similar meat. Spielberg: If I wanted an emotional reaction from I audience I could merely kill a cat. And more than one way to skin one, Gokita runs the permutations of it, taking the Borremans or Tyson turn here, the paint as flesh. Watch a body be melted, a face cleaved. A flower erupts a deformity or berries, it's difficult to tell, something the horror film cannot do: a painting's wayward stroke contains an ambiguity that is interpretable, abstract, like previous Gokita paintings.


See too: Michaël Borremans at Dallas Museum of Art, Nicola Tyson at Friedrich Petzel