Julien Nguyen at Modern Art

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carved with surgical precision, brandish the painterly like a sharp object. It lends a callousness to its images, figures, who, threatened by its scalpel, twist or elongate at the demands for painterly charisma. Like painting itself coerces the bodies into a marfan syndrome. One of Nguyen's closest counterparts might be Yuskavage overperformance of painting in colorful miasmas and overripe bodily distensions become here some masculine guile: doubling down on the biblical anachronism, stitching modern stylistics to old boards, a system for Nguyen to float brushwork as history unmoored and its ghosts redressed and cut up for today. Cartoon: Nail holes in flesh are instead rubies cut for symbols of blood, but there is none, no transubstantiation, only the artist's paint as the end game, bloodless, or this painting's aortic reds and blue chambers, like a diagram for heart.


See too: Lisa Yuskavage at Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis

Julien Nguyen at Freedman Fitzpatrick

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The unending loveliness of these, that, even we must admit, are good, technically adventurous and ripple with sex. Variance in finish shimmer like veins in marble or cocks, undulating detail as arousal: detail is attention paid, stimulation, titillation. For anyone who ever found eroticism in the restraint and rigidity of Piero della Francesca, here is your proof melting with Althoffian foppishness. These things bruise sex out of their flesh. Paintings with the depth of early video games while retaining the material pleasure of scuzz: a man smeared in choking purple softness, and legs splayed. Get close to his pink hand. There have never been more homoerotic paintings than these.


See too: Julien Ceccaldi at Jenny’s

Group Show at Neue Alte Brücke

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Artists: Magnus Andersen, George Rippon, Anna Zacharoff, Julien Nguyen
Exhibition Title: Late European Decadence

Neue Alte Brücke set the trend that come full circle to be greet with their own franchise deemed International Style, and so if this doesn't look “fresh” it at least looks current, hegemonically so; possibly the most important thing today is that art look fine, just fine, without an excess of presence and an irony to cut its own heel, a bridge to the new old decadence.


See too : Transatlantic Transparency at Mathew

“S.O.A.P.Y. III” at What Pipeline



From Frankfurt to London to now Detroit, it's a M. Carpenter marketing campaign that so many of the cool crowd attempt (with 1/10th the irony) since their elders networked success, a still physically viral necessitude in spite globally flat internet.
S.O.A.P.Y.’s magick and allegorical dungeon-capitalism acts as a fictitious umbrella, an excusable space not bound by art’s habitus. Things can get wacky when you’ve pre-excused them. So here we get a sort of 8-bit RPG of fetishized magic art-items. Healing amulets, and green orc-sax players, Parasols of Lambo-shadow, and wands and crystals galore - arranged in a grid like so many early nintendo adventurer’s inventories. Punning on the Städelschule materialist-surrealism. Art-Magick. Painting’s square like the battle screen. You’ve encountered the leather pants nihilist.
The excuse works, we get some campy-mysticism not normally allowed, but its a style laden on top the assemblage of tropes not meant to be taken too seriously, a sort of fresh air.