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.

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. 

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.