Zak Prekop at Galería Marta Cervera

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Prekop has notably remained unphased, almost unchanged, for the last decade. There's a sense of - like fractals - any one Prekop painting already contains every other Prekop painting, you just need to change the level of vantage. Even the color has remained a consistent off-crayola. A palette called Millennial Realtree. (Camo for the average Brooklyn apartment.) The pleasure of these paintings, succinctly stated, is abstraction turned to labyrinth. Not Stella's "what you see is what you see." But painting the puzzle before assembly. "obfuscates any sequence of steps that were taken." Which we are Jack Torrance and painting the boy sweeping away footprints in snow, us hunting for the meat, for the tender innards of poor painting. Painting must build defenses, attempt to elude apprehension, axe. 

See too: Charline von Heyl, Tomma Abts, Zak Prekop at Shane Campbell, Zak Prekop at Essex Street

Raha Raissnia at Marta Cervera

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Contraptions to capture the "ephemeral," make it tangible - nets for the schools of fish-like light.  The sculpture sediments feeling into rock; the painter, paint. Ostensibly. We seem to value art for its packaging. At some points in history more ephemeral forms of art were prized, say, songs because we didn't yet have books, and so whether this is a symptom of capitalism or of art is hard to tell. Fish in the ocean do not generate value by swimming, but being collected, in parks or nets. As an entry ticket or its meat. A reservation for entry, a thing to be gathered around.

Miriam Cahn at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía

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They look like drawings made by children to be diagnosed by therapists. And wearing their analysis on their sleeve. There's no confusion as to what these relate. And this should make them mawkish, sentimental, but the hammy naiveté only underscores. So much "bad painting" comes with an ironic wink made, generally, by grown men who affect their idiot savant, pretend Picassoing. These instead are too much, their saccharineness becomes its own abjection. Real stupidity, not feigned.


See too:Miriam Cahn at Meyer Riegger, Miriam Cahn at Jocelyn Wolff, Miriam Cahn at Meyer Riegger, Calvin Marcus at Clearing

Trisha Baga at Marta Cervera

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A genuine gesture to provide the 2D version just to really prove you're not seeing the 3D version, evidence of your distance. But providing the crappy version at least tries. Maybe you've got your own 3D glasses at home. 

Wilfredo Prieto at NoguerasBlanchard

 

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The Rorsharch tests that nature makes. Predators don’t search for meaning. God gives them to ours to mock us: the more inkblot-like mammals resultant from human domestication; wolves, foxes, and bovine undergoing human selection make Rorschach blots appear. Like God putting an easter egg in genetic biology. Messing back a message to those messing you. A good God joke. Whats are cows but a human technology for dairy. A narrative which our artist, well pedigreed in conceptual art, deploys in good conceptual fashion, using objects as representations for talking points. The best of which mutate in the beholder's eyes, an object as phantasm, visions for whoever is seeing it, to then be concretized in words like these, beautiful.

Ruth Root at Marta Cervera

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Like a Yield sign from hell. Dramatically asserting its declarative without reason. Incoherent as a Rachel Harrison sculpture. Organized but staunch against coherence, disorientating. Even when painting in solid elegant tones, Root's paintings never resolved anything fully tasteful. Their garishness precedes them.


See Too: Charline von Heyl at Gisela Capitain

David Diao at Marta Cervera

Diao’s work is often premised in the metanarrative established over the paintings, the provenance of painting, his own career, his fictional career hopes etc. Here the press release is in Spanish and the painting’s text in Cyrillic alphabet. We’re left with a formal mystery, of architectural bits printed and isolated, repeated, and painted as geometric abstraction, layered, and compared with futurist exhibitions, and then plus the Cyrillic.
The work extends a net of hope-to-be explication around itself, building and deferring and gesturing at itself, a slow-build complexing that structure a space of confusion and doubling back and second guessing. Somehow R.H. Quaytman meets Daan van Golden, weirdly.