Ebecho Muslimova at Kunsthall Stavanger

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I always liked when Bart got an X-Ray. Or that time when Homer went 3-D, that he was nervous about it. Homer adrift in the abyss of the matrix. Horror over his body. What were these things, ontologically? Did they have meat, air, blood, breath? The show went meta in an existential way.  But I never enjoyed Fatebe's similar transmogrification to painting. Her being a different substance than the world felt like a brand logo placed into the expensivizer device, painting. Homer: "This place looks expensive." That her environment was messy with 3D SFX was maybe a in-joke on this more jeweled painted world. But it never felt as magic as Fatebe in drawing getting a whole piano inside her. That was the thrill of her natural world, it was consistent. Which is all to say, this above painting is the first that I've enjoyed. Fatebe cut open to reveal she is of the same world, she bleeds, she has steaks, stakes. 

"... When the [Fatebe] cartoon now does its Who Framed Roger Rabbit thing, the duck finally becomes a cartoon duck, the visual promiscuity is lost, his flesh is now not of the the surrounding world...  Fatebe becomes no longer a natural feature of her reality but a style cut and pasted into. And her world becomes simply a grab bag of digital effects to encounter."

Cindy Ji Hye Kim at Kunsthall Stavanger

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Saccharine counterbalanced with fragility in excess. Laser cut bones, graphite sandcastles. This will all be erased! Graphite drawing: granules in time, sand in the hourglass! It makes the chintz bearable knowing it will disappear. Why does our nervous systems resemble brambles? Our venous system roses? Our love all tinder in the long run's fire. As we desiccate. To the charcoal we will become. Art linked to our own bonfire.  It makes the sweetness temporary, endurable. Saying the same thing 3 times. 

Sandra Vaka at Kunsthall Stavanger

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The world isn't so much a vampire as a system of straws attempting to drink one another's milkshake.

Sascha Braunig at Kunsthall Stavanger

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What is clear is that rendering's look itself has come to represent and stand in for our imaginative space and potential. The wet image absorbed the qualities of virtual space, the sheen of the digitally plastic denoting its manipulability. You see it in the ipad lushness of Orion Martin, the nervous sweat of Atkin's avatar's forehead, the gloss of Wolfson's images dirtied, the cartoon liquidity of Juliano-Villani, the paintings of Koons. Used to stress position the subject/object delineation. The importance of iconographies for many of these people is evidence of our growing identification with icons as subjects themselves come to represent us and open to torture.


See too: Sascha Braunig at Rodolphe Janssen, “Puddle, pothole, portal” at Sculpture Center, Erwin Wurm at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg

Judith Bernstein at Kunsthall Stavanger

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The conceptual cymbal crash, punning cocks with screw, was defeatist humor mocking not just the male tool but deflating the hard language of conceptual art: telling the joke over and over again on larger and larger sheets of paper, the high rhetoric of big egos reduced to a bad joke - Cue: Beyonce "♪♫ Cause he's got a big 'ego.' ♪♫" Bernstein: "it wasn’t funny." 



See too: Judith Bernstein at Mary Boone

Torbjørn Rødland at Kunsthall Stavanger



The PR’s refusal to acknowledge the sexual themes leaves the perverts guessing. Erotic coupling, miscegenation of binary masculine/feminine, phallic/soft. Everything touching, lightly. Black butterflies suckling split bananas opened nectar. Spire’s gape like saddled into stirrups. This into that. Penetrating weave of wicker threaded with ticklish horsehair. Oh me oh my. Porcelain lighting on fragile goosepimpled legs, secured into stout kneepad’s digital camo. One thing into the other. “Our wedding,” the coupling, the light caressing of a face. The slit orange’s tufts.

“Comparing a sock to a vagina is OK, it’s done all the time, but you’d have to be insane to compare a pure aggregate of stitches to a field of vaginas [...] Salvador Dali, in attempting to reproduce his delusions, may go on at length about the rhinoceros horn; [...] But when he starts comparing goosebumps to a field of tiny rhinoceros horns, we get the feeling that the atmosphere has changed and that we are now in the presence of madness.” - D+G