Jennifer Packer at Corvi-Mora

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These seem transparent about intentions, to get color at scale. Bouquets of it. The linework, the drawing, an excuse to hang wanton libidinal paint. Watermelon theory. Conceptually we prize art for what it means, for its "politics," but then occasionally we remember that the beach exists. That candy tastes sweet, and chefs, chemists, need reinvent it. 

Anna Uddenberg at The Perimeter

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The Greeks revolutionized ancient sculpture with contrapposto serving cunty, but now we've appropriated whole new asanas. Update figuration with fashion, this makes new. And new fabrics, new frills. You no longer paint the model, you tell the model how to dress. A thrill to play with dolls - they'll wear whatever, bend however. Matisse proved bending women till they're blue everyone found fun. Compositionalizing women for culture. It works! This is cynical but it is maybe naturalism.

Art loves women in culturally approved bondage gear: Cindy Sherman at Metro Pictures, Amalia Ulman at The Gallery at El Centro

Max Hooper Schneider at Maureen Paley

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There is little difference between the vitrine and the television, a box for growing an amoeba-like sentience - be the longterm point MHS has been making. And its parallel to painting. The petri dishes of a culture medium. Culturing culture. These grow lights. It's fun to open up a TV and see a brain, cut open a painting and see anything but art, splice into fantasyland, the casino shrunken, it's a small world afterall. 

Read all: Max Hooper Schneider

Anna Glantz at The Approach

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Glantz's surrealism has become more subtle, repressed into the paint itself, making you the fool explaining the surface of a face, painting. 

Georgie Nettell at Project Native Informant

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>>>Modern Gothic

This is an example of the Modern Gothic.

The strategy: employ, display, the depressing methods of our late-stage-nightmare. A celebration you nor anyone will enjoy - it's in the title. The high five of office pizza parties, the coal black drudgery of corportized fun. What does it mean to give out what you know no one wants. The Modern Gothic can't be mistaken as art, won't provide that relief. The Modern Gothic only redoubles the banality. The John Knight quote: "It’s the primary lexicon for substantiating neoliberalism. It’s the off-the-shelf language of hegemony." We all know we hate this, why does it exist, why can't we stop it, this balloon party to capitalism.

This "repackaged and repurposed disobedience" with "a raw print speed of more than 12,000 square feet per hour." MASS MARKET HOPE. MASS MARKET CRITIQUE. Like the iconic Fairey poster quickly depleting its utopic optimism, now appearing ironic gravestone. A ballon party to the corruption of desire for political agency. Replacing it with the politically negligent. The strategy of corrupting critique, corrupting our political language, ruins our ability to form political response. If you fuck up language, the rational, enough it destroys the ability to speak, to think. Enough of this causes the "learned helplessness in rats."

Jacqueline Humphries at Modern Art

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The long and short of it is, Humphries always remained ahead of the zombies by making the embalming process more cartoonish, more itself, and gave us what we always really wanted: new paint, a shinier paint, a wanton paint. (The zombie formalist only had handwringing conceptual excuses for old paint, their endless search for "brains" to make 2nd generation Abex somehow refreshed with "process" but generating old looks.) Humphries looked garishly more - without excuse - bested abex by being even more airheaded than it - no search for brains, just new paint big. Humphries processes always felt mere wreaths to the dingdong, which they were, exceptionally beside the point. (That was the point, you didn't need them.) But lo this is the first exhibition where the first thing you see, a quotation, not delicious paint, a conceptual process foreground itself, which is like reading IKEA instructions for the sex promised.

Maaike Schoorel at Studio M

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Teasing cotton candy seems the sort of blue-balling kink we'd be into and you're right. There's pleasure in restraint. We don't need the cake, we only need to know there might be cake. Don't fuck me, just give the air its possibility. The crumbs of someone else's pleasure, that's how painting works. 

Richard Tuttle at Modern Art

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You got to hand it to Tuttle, he never cashed in, never cast it in bronze. Instead still the pernickety things hard to swallow, like fishing lures they need only approximate the shiny fish of formalism. Provisional objects still hook us. Look how crappy that sculpture is. Is this cute? Coy? Useless? Still resolutely ugly in a formally confetti way, continually falling apart is what they were meant to. 

Gretchen Bender at Sprüth Magers

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The simple Brechtian device, knot tied around finger, reminder distance. In comparison, how overwrought today's hi-budget televisual orgies. An interesting observation from the PR even, "Layering text over moving image is as familiar now in memes, tweets and social media posts," - that these are memes, constantly updating, live, cycling between nonsense and prescient. An analog HUD. "Items that are overdetermined to point of banality, yet the obviousness of the operation does not lessen it." Now you get to watch TV with some ostensible criticality, two TVs at once, what could be better. 

See too: Julia Scher, Gretchen Bender at Wilkinson

Reto Pulfer at Hollybush Gardens

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This type of artwork may be the final boss of 2010s contemporary art. A book you can't read. Pinned to the floor. An object of infinite affect. Compare to this object from 7 years ago. The tied up text.

"The packaging - the design, the arrangement - is the object, the affective manipulation of its viewer: the object above all connotes. Connotes intention and therefore meaning. The documentation encircles and presents it." But also prevents it.

"It creates a hole for the projection of its potential, fun or meaning. ...  The art object must be an inexhaustible hole, an affectation of the toy never opened. Like the toy manufacturer who ultimately wins by having privatized access to object, the artwork privatizes its "meaning." [Both are locked in packaging. ] It "means" nothing outside of the inflection of its affect [advertsing]. Circulates its sign within the sign structures of art, it looks like art, like it means something."

The toy designer and the artist no longer design a toy, design an artwork, they design a transaction. 

Manuel Solano at Carlos/Ishikawa

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The blind painter, it's like a Borges story, we see the creation the creator cannot. The preloaded failure in communication, the age old question whether the tree in my mind is the tree in yours. Why was it important for culture to keep dinosaurs lizard like - we were afraid of boys constricted by feather boas? Puffs with teeth underneath? If these dinosaurs are flamboyant then Jurassic Park's are alt-right. We're not even sure we're looking at the same thing. Different trees.

Terry Winters at Modern Art

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Terry Winters is proof that dumb painting can look smart with the whiff of information, science, intelligence. The gentlest hint of reason. So bubble up signs in mud, possible glyphs to understanding. Because we want paintings that speak, mean.

Like all those microscopic slides whose abstraction we nonscientists can't assess but are told hold meaning. Isn't that the perfect analogy for art?

We apophenic machines: Antek Walczak at Jenny’s

John Lindell at Corvi-Mora

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There are just certain curves that imply. That we will relate to. Not tell mom about. "The most direct rules of inanimate erotics are first- that the object be becoming flesh, and second exemplifying the curve of inside into out. These turns are important, they mirror our body's soft points, the vulnerable pink cusps. Your lips, eyes, anus, ears, urethral opening, these twilight moments rolling into... an expression of explicit vulnerability. They resemble, brandish resemblance, which morph in sinuous exterior/interior unsecured - aortic openings hint interior chambers, others skeletal - they twist in on themselves like an ouroboric muscle car. Like cutting open your abdomen to reveal a cathedral. ... but the transitional state of the objects isn't so much a becoming-subject of the abject, but instead a faint pubescence of gender, objects just arriving at a split, a fork budding a semblance of female or male possibility..."

Kembra Pfahler at Emalin

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As art becomes identity - not that it ever wasn't - this overloaded branded version begins to make sense.

similarly: Juliana Huxtable at Reena Spaulings

Phillip Allen at The Approach

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Like a food scientist at the forefront of taste, on the eve of the Dorito, artists' approach to consumability is a less direct rod to dopamine receptors yet no less disinterested in creating Fruit Loops.

Rinella Alfonso at Project Native Informant

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You can't tell the difference anymore between young and old art. Is this an artist of the 20th century reemerging, or is this someone who doesn't remember Francesco Clemente  or 9/11? Today's paintings emerge from any age. Previously, you had been able to tell, you would say this is the forefront, made by a 20 something in Berlin, but today painting emerges antiquated. Today we like the old things, it gives the appearance of being longlasting. 

Paleototemism: stonehengification

Caspar Heinemann at Cabinet

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"Cardboard like a sloughed flesh for transit."

"and soggy cardboard is like a rotting flesh"

"Your touch leaves a mark, sews a patch, you reproduce yourself in the objects you attend. Preciousness in warm cardboard, wearing touch, eroding to someone's love."

like a flesh, ornamented and stringed. Dripped pearls and a hole slightly greased.

Mohammed Sami at Modern Art

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Painting is affect nailed to content. A vibe sewn to image. Internally, the content withdraws to mystery, creating a distending space where paint floats above a darkening void. An interface of brush and flowers, in foliage a search for clues, a search for where to lay meaning. This is what painting must tension as its interminable life support. This is what we prize painting for, the mud writ question

See: Shannon Cartier Lucy at Hussenot 

Rachel Rose Enclosure Pilar Corrias, London

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Weather you can turn on and off, affect detached from reality, a sunset in vial. The preservation of feeling. The embalm of sentiment. Painterly effects, a sun you unplug. Art, like the dandelion, becomes a tool for the storage and display of moonlight, sensation.

see too: Steve Bishop at Kunstverein Braunschweig, Pamela Rosenkranz at Karma International

Allison Katz at Camden Arts Centre

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"A mystery! A mystery! Where can I lay meaning?"

 

"[Art] is a cultural structure such that its prize is "what it is about." ...  there is something to be unlocked, understood. There is something to be won. This is the belief. ... Painting begins to be prized not for painting but for this mystery. And a mystery, should it not spoil itself, cannot tell you its answer. A mystery instead must load its objects with intent, clues, an ambrosia of noir, an affect of meaning."

Content becomes the lure to questions. PR: "the viewer is compelled to seek out connecting lines running through the apparently disparate subject matter; associations, and conversations that must be imagined and elaborated in order to complete the circuit." But content is the red herring. Questions are Frankensteinian death-in-life of art. The actual meaning is in this means to distribute meaning. To make it feel like there may be some. A meaning-feeling metaphor that's apt to life. There may be none!