Mathew Cerletty at The Power Station

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As "photography" becomes ever more processed by virtual machines, and "realism" so abstracted beyond anything concrete, the term "photorealism" becomes meaningless against our cartoon stuf. The new plastic real. The protagonists of Toy Story are not representations of cowboys or Space Rangers, their being is rendering: "YOU ARE A TOY," screams the sheriff of this reality. But through the power of movie magic, they are suspended between. Their image is the real, the world around them is made false, a rendering in comparison. When you buy the cartoon sponge off the shelf, you don't purchase the one in your hand, you purchase that higher order of its affective image, its grease scrubbing sorcery. This higher order that arranges us. Originals without origin. Which rubber duck is this? Where is this image located?

Mathew Cerletty at STANDARD (OSLO)

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It's like the closer it is to reproducing its sign that maybe reality starts to panic. Not necessarily the platonic forms, but, like, maybe. Painting feeling like objects smoothing into their icons, symbols, some sort of shorthand for reality which isn't it.
Appropriation by means of really really close, technical, representation. Which, Sturtevantily, negates it.

Mathew Cerletty at Karma

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like the Back to the Future retro-avant we see currently dominating fashion and politics, nostalgia is candied. The "again" of greatness we are implored to make becomes unhinged from any particular time the imperative could point at. "Again" becomes merely reactionary twist to flood cliche with the nostalgia fueling it. "Again" never was but today repainting the past. These paintings are that "again:" signifieds ripped from referable time. Painting translates into into some anachronistic slide of retro-present, between icons, CGI renderings, "photorealism," illustrations: whatever their means of referring to any realness is lost, and this loss of reality ironically allows the viewer or voter to inflate with their interpretable own. Depictions have all but become completely untethered from physicality, and Cerletty has seeming captured the balloons adrift. These are fake images, but inability to determine the level of artificiality makes them unnerving. Cerletty's stripping the metadata turns everything into clues pointing as interpretable evidence to a time that never took place but in the speakers allowing you to formulate it yourself.


see too: Mathew Cerletty at Office Baroque 

Mathew Cerletty, Julia Rommel at STANDARD (OSLO)

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Boring at two ends of the value spectrum for painting today, meaning and object. At one end the object is valuable as a cultural emblem, painting, of historical accreditation, of a history of painting, and so Rommel makes the object structurally flaunt itself, give paint a stage upon which to display itself, paint, stripped and naked before us, and at the other end Cerletty's use of painting's cultural valuation for meaning turned into a puzzle game of clue boards of symbolist rubik's-cubeification, bright figures twisted and turned for you to puzzle over, man's search for meaning gamified on the board of painting.


See too: Mathew Cerletty at Office Baroque, Julia Rommel at Overduin & Co.

Mathew Cerletty at Office Baroque



An adaptive logic, staying slightly ahead of predictability within a semi-consistent style so as to appear consistent (the first rule of any good game), Cerletty’s long run involves the interminable re-routings of someone evading, or being evasive. Any broad assertions about Cerletty’s work are made to come prepackaged with the clarification “except of course when it isn’t.” Identity, rather than constructed as “sameness over time” path, instead attempts fracturing, balloons to a meta-level, where the map looks like maze, endless deferrals, backtracking notes in succession but never in any repetition.

“slight deviations from normalcy”
“most exciting when you make something that’s not immediately recognizable as your own”
“like a jigsaw puzzle link.”

It could force us to look at individual paintings, but the paintings themselves, in their askew settings, also defer “sense.” With their illustrative clarity they offer hints, appear as clues, to some pre-established mystery of what their direct and illustrativeness - highly rendered petroglyphs - might be telling us, appearing as so much evidence, but the mystery never resolves itself, as it shouldn't in all “great art” until you feel as though maybe this is the game, of course, being played. The work is thus premised on having the illusion of containing, or being able to convey, some sort of necessary information but never, of course, actually revealing it, or even revealing the rules of the apparently very logical game, as mysterio objects and totally fun. When it works, such as the Algus Greenspon show, the work creates a sort of vertigo, a reeling from having truly been a culprit one step-ahead of the viewer as detective.