Josh Smith at David Zwirner

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Wow.. this press release is practically bulging with self-pleasure:
"First" "Infinite" "instantly" "absolutely everything" "A whole new world" "immediate" "now" "the spirit" These are the words you can buy with blue chips. The artist is pure experience, sensation. Plugged into the raw. So, it doesn't matter they look like bad post-impressionism, the point is that the artist is electric - is channelling. Dancing around saying the word Truth.

Josh Smith at David Zwirner

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Maybe what Smith actually provides is relief. Against paintings overdetermined to like the nth degrees by whatever surrealist imago kool-aid the artworld currently swimming, Smith's is an interminable vacation to fields of ever stupid flowers. None of these painting individually matter. Functional. Require zero attention. Just exist like idiotic specimens of a genus Smith. Perhaps this is what Eliza Douglas was responding to, an idea executed, eventually you live long enough with it to learn to love your captor.

Group Show at Essex Street

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"Baer repeatedly crunches together heterogeneous visual registers to produce a kind of spatial-temporal pile-up." (-James Cahill) Temporal pile-up like Baer's recent resurgence with body of work difficult to discern if timely or anachronistic. The quote could describe Jana Euler work just as well. But later, "In recent decades, Baer has consistently straddled personal and cosmic registers." Baer a little more shamanistic in the deployment of symbols. But so maybe that's what this exhibition is about, the soft proffering of symbols through thin veils, the different means to do it, Smith's body stuck to walls, Vogel's thrifted objects, Smith's Munch touchups, Baer's past now tinging the present.

Josh Smith at STANDARD (OSLO)

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What was with our fetish then for exaggerated manufacture remains a question, for since we've grown tired of zombies that Smith and the gang had some hand spawning, Guyton, Walker, Price, a group for whom production was theme: recycling, automation, dispersion and Smith's prolificacy spamming himself into consciousness with grotesque versions to prove the mass, beating his name and himself in the head. That Smith is now making painting that are fine, pleasant even, a sort of radical gesture of normalcy, norm-core - aside from the PR excused "heavy handed" imagery - out-pleasanting even the most decorous of painters, the face of death even looking like the Scream.



See too: Ann Craven at Confort Moderne, Ida Ekblad at Herald St.

Fredrik Værslev at Bergen Kunsthall

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Continuously amazing, Josh Smith's ability to produce a tasteful painting today. And Værslev too an incommensurate tastifying of painting identities smoothed and well worn into comfort: the softness of acid-washed history, whose untreated denim is stiff, abrasive, and has edges that Værslev happily washes away, with the already pre-distressed historical material. Gerberian friend support is made as a kind of joke, of painting "off-the-shelf," readymade and there's a story Værslev tells in interviews, of the shelf origin in which in his final moments at the Städelschule, and tormented years since his last paintings -"for three years and a half I did not paint, not a single drop of paint" - and encouraged heavily by professor de Rooij, he makes a painting to his (Værslev's) mother's specifications: useful and pink with a shelf for her flowers to prevent stereo ruination and does so, paints the pink shelf with the flowers, and this success deemed by professor student and ostensibly mother seems an apt in describing its continuation today meeting demand for a market, giving the people what they want, a comfort.


See too: Fredrik Vaerslev at Centre d’Art Contemporain Passerelle

Josh Smith at Bonner Kunstverein

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Adopts the cripplingly tasteful resignation of palatable colors in oyster-like forms and the champagne popped for the final internment of distinction between critical and sellout, subversiveness actually always tasteful or tastefulness now subversive.

See too: Josh Smith at at Eva Presenhuber

Josh Smith at at Eva Presenhuber

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Half decade ago the most reviled painter on campuses, now they sorta look just like any other painting made today. Whether this is because Smith as the last Naumanian understood the wild importance of Ford's speed (and in-distinction) creating busywork spam into cultural consensus, or any true influence is hard to discern.

See too: Ann Craven at Confort Moderne, Zak Prekop at Shane Campbell