Hanna Hur at Kristina Kite Gallery

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Spirituality was always psychedelia wearing a different coat. The vibes were differently ordered. Sacred Geometry, Minimalism. And this is the Venn center of all of them. Geometric psychedelia. Sacred hallucinatory. Amsler grids for God. Sense a higher plane, order, any order, just order, through the meat of your eyes.

see too: Hanna Hur at Feuilleton

Caitlin Keogh at Overduin & Co.

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What can a tornado mean? How does it speak, catapulting whole neighborhoods into the air. A house blown up, again. How many times can you explode the house, the archive, mailbox, fenceposts, Greg, displayed, waving though the air, help. They continue beyond the frame! What can a Tornado mean by this? This is the fallout of Rachel Harrison semiotic explosion. The settling dust of nonsense. This is meaning aloft, in midair, the detritus of whatever art recently smart bombed. The airline wreckage cataloging its hangar. The little stick and poke tattoos glistening on your body. This face of Post Malone. A pox, outward flush of signs. He's got a case of the semiotics. He's got a pox of the interpretability. The illustration is clear.. but the meaning, whoa, wait till you get a load of the meaning. It's everywhere. The point is to make it look like a Clue board, to make the game is meaning. The loser is the first person to say "pipe."

Chadwick Rantanen at Michael Benevento Gallery & Aria Dean at Progetto

(Benevento, Progetto)

Silent instruments, silence musicians. Artists castrate sound. What is the resonance of mute instrument? What is the sound of one hand clapping? Between the form and the lost notes is the gap, the fissure allowing the viewer fill meaning in that distance. Blue ball you until you mean it. 

cameron clayborn at Morán Morán

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Not looking different but looking affected different. Chewed, digested, rubbed. Not really sculpted. A figure that's more accumulated by abuse of handwork <-- That's a metaphor.  Like Eraserhead too "mocks and assesses the event of the family portrait." Everyone's wounded, welcome, here's your artistic panacea. 

See too: Alma Allen at Shane Campbell

Dominique Knowles at Hannah Hoffman Gallery

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The use of "memory" in art generally finances loathsome schmaltz, turning the weight of concrete into gold bars of MEANING. Dusty, half-remembered paintings would feel like a slight but its true, they receding, they returning to the dust they will become. A world or a child, trying to recall a horse. Trying to remember how painting was. It is stupid blurry, worthless, it is weightlessly gone. Less memory than foreboding. More futuristic than most sci-fi tech.  

Mónika Kárándi at Anat Ebgi

(link)

The Welwitschis mirabilis plant looks like something the surrealists would want to have sex with, so it makes logical fodder for painting today. A humanoid brushstroke laying out in the sun, that's how you get a Tanguy.

Morag Keil, Bedros Yeretzian at Commercial Street, Los Angeles

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Word clouds exploded as the vacuous form of auto-generated poetry that - as art - found meaning through artifactifying culture. Pulling objects from the wreckage to totemize - ascribe aura as font-size to. And generate an ostensible meta-layer of meaning. Doesn't this sound like art? Like art, it was stupid. Turning text into an inkblot to search for signs of what ended up being only your mother's indifference. Yourself in a warbled mirror. 

See too: Click Merlin Carpenter at Overduin & Co., Lutz Bacher at 3320 18th St

Oliver Osborne at Tanya Leighton

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The Symbol. Archaic and X-rayed. Dressed and redressed. What could it mean, this puzzification. A clue is presented, then tortured, wrung for information, why won't painting tell us, why, speak dammit. 

Martin Puryear at Matthew Marks

(link)

A sculpture that misleads. Hard to take in. Creates two rooms. A hidden internal structure and in another world, the one we occupy, the anode gathering air. Going to somehow turn us inside out. 

Merlin James at Chris Sharp Gallery

(link)

James makes paintings that are difficult without resort to "bad painting." A distinction interesting since, for all "bad painting"'s ostensible antagonism to rational orders and anti-appeal, has become immensely commodified - the idiot savant nappies now become blue chip trading cards. Somehow the adults love trading diapers. Bad painting not so bad. The point: James's rejection is more obtuse, slow to reach the demands of consumable painting. Like Hans Hoffman, an intellect doomed to make terrible paintings. Or Joseph Albers always being terrible at color. James forever caroms off anything digestible. Elderstatesman to the Richard Aldriches working tangentially to canon's rutted path, instead an outer mud searched through, never really wiped clean. 

See too: Richard Aldrich

Na Mira at Park View/Paul Soto

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Mirrors which allow color to spill, bleed. Into the political dimension - a place artworld can see but can't access. Just hope our artwork somehow runs into it. 

Mungo Thomson at KARMA

(link)

This is just the Bechers with a jazz soundtrack. 

Like Marclay's Clock, interest is subsumed to a logic, an accounting fulfilling the parameters. Quality is mere quantity, organized. Collector porn or just something to do with those stacks of old magazines. It would seem to have some relation to conceptual art, with the aesthetics of administration. But what Bernd and Hilla Becher made into an ontological question, Mungo Thompson turns into a funhouse, conceptual art with the numbing affects of cinema. There are no questions here, only bad answers. Questions depleted to games. Thompson trades the aesthetic experience for the trick of "getting it." Getting it becomes the relief. Because people hate "not getting it" and Mungo is there to apply balm that the world makes sense, that there is rationality in the system.

Elliott Hundley at Regen Projects

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The "just fuck my shit up" school of reasoning paint to canvas. Building armatures to spray. Rube Goldberg device, for displaying juice. Paint will always look good. This is a permanent feature of art - that these gold coins we trade are always already minted, you are just looking for reasons to fill the parameters. A backronym for the trade. 

Poppy Jones at Overduin & Co.

(link)

The receding sign, withdrawal, threatening loss, like paintings in the rain. 🥺 sad. "art often feels like a process, technology, for imprinting nostalgia. Casting banality in bronze, silver, with a halo of rose. " The Sontagian elegy of photographs as an Instagram filter. "preserves your recognition like pickled pigs and call it romantic." Pre-attaching its loss, you can almost print it. Nostalgia turning into an industry for creating it. 

see too: Moyra Davey, Peter Hujar at Galerie Buchholz

Koichi Enomoto at Nonaka-Hill

(link)

This on the other hand is the Pollockification of figuration. The splatter gun school of content. The drips become sign systems, limbs, etc. Painting is the flypaper of culture. Collects its surreal. All forced into the depth of an Ipad, or again, Beckman. Painting as your punk jacket assembled and stitched with the cultural buttons you find neat. 

Adam Higgins at Chris Sharp Gallery

(link)

Drip paintings as hyper realist memento mori? A salad days preserved for years, preserved by "photography's inherent embalm and morbidity." Argument: "But youth should be wasted, sloughed into bogs of our own autumns. Instead [salad's] preservation, feeling always like photography flexing its own ability to do so, holding its pearl while we are like strapped to dying animals, timers and all. Like Imhof's Faust, subjects are forced into becoming advertisements for themselves [for painting], for the thing they cannot hold onto but [art] gets to reap." So you get your big abstraction, at a slight remove, and the humility flies upon it. They're vanitas, all art temporary, your Pollock rots, attracts vermin. This will all spoil!  But only in representation. "Dutch vanitas were also a means for the wealthy to signal their humility through ostentatious displays of said humility." The joke is you get your cake and display a humble cake too. 

Masaya Chiba at Bel Ami

(link)

Display being a function of reproduction, education. Masaya Chiba's always something pedagogically askew - like there's a presentation happening, there's some thing scientifically flat about the work - illustrative - but without information's answer. They seem to imply some big red arrow that would point out meaning, but lacking it instead presents that interminable inkblot question, 

see too: Masaya Chiba at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery

Peter Bradley at KARMA

(link)

Painting like a trap for accumulating ... what? Not content precisely but something we might confuse with it. Painting like a trap fo accumulating our heads. A retainer for mental projection, light.

David-Jeremiah at Meliksetian | Briggs

(link)

The inkblotification of art meeting its stonhengification. Luckily they ironize each other. Turning trope to monument. Turning the trope theatrical. An overwrought materiality one can appreciate. Like Pope.L, a joke that dissipates instead into the punchline of expectation, blackness for your projection.

see too: stonehengification, Inkblot, Pope.L

Chadwick Rantanen at Bel Ami

(link)

".. collected images of the cross. ...Rantanen removes the cruciform’s transom or horizontal beam, reducing it to a simple column. The subtle alterations are surgical...  grafting and stitching to restore ...."

At first was thinking circumcision, but realized: it's tearing off the wings a butterfly, removing the potential of resurrection/metamorphosis - returning the butterfly to its immanent flightless body, a grub, snivelling across surface. Witnesses say "flee from idolatry ...  Because there is one loaf, we, although many, are one body, for we are all partaking of that one loaf." No transcendence. A staircase to nowhere, here.