Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda at Koelnischer Kunstverein

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It's important to note the artists' strategies in mise-en-scene. These photos tell you nothing, give you no information but they connote an affect, one of literal and metaphorical velvet ropes. What, after all, is this photograph of? Of the air, in the impressionist sense. That emptiness they love. Cold like sharks. It'd be something if the artists didn't have at least some hand in the documentation. Or maybe there is just that much air. Like John Knight, the strategies of withholding generate power. In forests we imagine predators, in confusion invent gods, or artists.


See too: John Knight at Greene Naftali, Yngve Holen at Kunsthalle Basel

“Cut-Up” and Wolfgang Tillmans at Koelnischer Kunstverein

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A "program of events" that we receive now as the promotion of in the empty rooms you could have stood in and heard what you can't hear here, that we should recognize as true of not just these types of "living-structures" but of all images interfaces which make art its own auto-promotion in canvas it embeds itself in.

Julien Ceccaldi at Koelnischer Kunstverein

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Conjuring the stupidity and desperation of the forlorn, something J Ceccaldi repeats in the wasteoids and corpses against the Adonic beauties they cast themselves at. Turning the romance form into its caricature, comic with They Live glasses of romance tropes perhaps. Love never feels as thrilling or effective as it does in the commodified form of a Movie preview, in a montage, in a Pretty Woman story. I've never been a Disney Princess, but I have been a corpse. The movie makes felt this distance its spectacle, the main character's fawning for their love interest mirrors the viewers own longing for the narrative's created love, a creation of desire. The movie's resolution provides myth for the possibility of our own. It's not true you're just a living corpse.

Leidy Churchman at Koelnischer Kunstverein

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"Heterogeneity" in painting, the lack of identifiable style, of painterly identity, that has become increasingly common, shifting subjects, means and themes, we find still neurotic - still being mentioned in PR. It's conversant spectacle, finger to the viewer, who is asked to sort it out. This avoidance of identity, could be argued as an abdication of responsibility, but like the fish before left well enough alone, the distance asks for understanding that we aren't required to, and can't, know, take each painting as individuals rather than as groups of things we already presume to understand.



See too: Allison Katz at Gio Marconi, Adriana Lara at Algus Greenspon, Annette Kelm at Gio Marconi, Leidy Churchman at Rodeo