Magali Reus at Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Deurle

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Reus is exemplar of the cartoonification of the world. Everything convertible to plastic, printable. "tradition was wiped out by the invention of capitalist plastic. Labor was reduced to work, and craft became manufacturing processes, became laser cut wood, CNC milled blocks, a thousand interns on call. Suddenly your dreams could be injection molded. Ostensibly." Now the chore becomes pressing print, of everything on everything, Paintings are already printed on totes to toilet paper so why not a wooden spool? The algorithm combines and consumer clicks value. The artist becomes the algorithm in a society that doesn't know what it wants. The great recombinator. Post Rachel Harrison blowing up the mall - it returns as souvenirs. It is not the artist's "semantic ambivalence" - it is the world's. The world is stupid and functioning, and art we are given we are said to deserve. 

See too: Darren Bader at Andrew Kreps, Sam Pulitzer at House of Gaga, Sanya Kantarovsky, Camille Blatrix at Modern Art, Rachel Harrison at Whitney Museum

Something About Us at Fons Welters, Amsterdam

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A show of fragile candy, soft and hard shell, capturing its affect in an art lozenge. Swallowable. Affect has always been important to art, machismo sizing of the expressionists, the bureaucratic cool of conceptualism. Affect connoted the reverence you should have for the church objects. Which ostensibly released meaning. But now affect is itself the captured thing, the feeling, packaged. 

Magali Reus at Westfälischer Kunstverein

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Tableaus, table pictures, carefully posed "the approach thus marries the art forms of the stage with those of painting or photography, and as such it has been of interest to modern" sculptors framing the objects of which "Not one single piece of apparent detritus on the curb is a found object" each is a"public archaeological relic" desiring study. Like the enlarged illustrations of locks manifested in the physical and adorning the walls the created objects treat the real as constructible, the physical as putty in cartoons, detached from their specific instance and arranged into hieroglyphs, what Javier Hontoria referred to as the artists's "semantic ambivalence."


see too: David Lieske at MUMOK, Alicja Kwade at Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Katherine Bernhardt at Venus Over Manhattan,  Merlin Carpenter at MD 72