Martin Puryear at Matthew Marks

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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. 

“Magic Ben Big Boy” at Matthew Marks

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You can see what was already in the later work then, that endless turning from inside to outside, what is open and what is hidden. While ever more skeletally baroque now, the similar rotations then, into shyness then. A portal opens, a cork plugs, things are sealed, places buried. What happens inside these "Shirley Temple Rooms" is what's at stake, but the exhibition's "Ben" is a Michael Jackson song about a boy who love his rat, and the "Big Boy" is adult sized sexual assault trauma doll, and the "Magic" is some old crone with a box of roses, cats wideyed at their prey, Magic Ben the big boy, and our eyes the size of eggs, I'm sure you can put the story together.

“Painting: Now & Forever, Part III” at Greene Naftali & Matthew Marks

(Greene Naftali, Matthew Marks)*

"Painting Now and Forever I-III"
"Painting Forever!"
"The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting"

"Painting Now" is unfortunately a book though.

and "Now that's what I call painting" seems also to have been a show in a Chicago gallery Scott projects.

*Interestingly the first "Now that's What I Call Music" was released in the US shortly after Part I, in 1998.

As Frankel said of Part II in Artforum it's sort of like "blowing your trumpet in the middle of a marching band." Painting, then as now and possibly forever, isn't in need of cheerleaders, painting sort of auto-blows itself. "But there's some good paintings in here!" as the reviews state. A survey, taking stock of the land so as to produce a map. Great. There's more figuration, color, surrealism, goo. Go look at 2008 here or here. Remember that? Guyton, Price, Smith, Walker, the concentration on the production as excuse to the product? The market was about to fall out the floor in 2 months but it was built back up on the mindless dead who took the 2008ists at their word: painting meant a concept for its execution, pressing print, spraying paint, screen-printing bricks to prove the wall you were looking. The fallout left a vacuum to be filled with those picking up the remains, and we were berated by it until someone finally assembled a figure. So now, 2018, we have the peak of figuration. Guess what is probably going to happen next. Can you short the market for figuration?

Charles Ray at Matthew Marks

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Finally finding a material to embody the mercurialness previously only conceptual seemingly allowing the more banal subject recent, finally treating the human as the minimalist cubes - forms nudged to psychedelia, reflective folds in aluminum just phantasmically melting before you. Terminator 2 spent an equally exorbitant budget to give the T1000 its technologically advanced look, seeing archetypal forms rendered in technologic detail exquisite. A certain mole mentioned in the PR. Think before how a circular partition of wall was - though seemingly not - spinning at speed. The formal becomes archetypes of antiquity frozen, like stock images with an abject specificity of a certain mole mentioned in the PR. They look boring in photograph because the gloss of expense occludes the humans as means. But “One could say I’ve spent a great deal of time making very little of my subject matter.”

Vija Celmins at Matthew Marks

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The promise of two ends meeting, of connection, of art's ability to represent; art's promise to conjure the thing itself. The stupidity of this promise.  The sorrow so present in Celmin's work is breakdown guilt of this, which all we are left with instead is brushwork, the skin of thing over an "armature on which I hang my marks and make my art."  The artists and the electrical torture of the sign.

See too: On Kawara at the Guggenheim, Lutz Bacher at 356 Mission, James Lee Byars at VeneKlasen/Werner

Paul Sietsema at Matthew Marks

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The hamfisted questioning of painting representation which we all thought had died when pipes were called to question, and Foucault treatised, returns possibly with intonations of "Forget Foucault" whose simulacrum comes bulldozing in with questions of representations replacing real. It's literal here in the currency whose IRL lines authenticate it, and questions abound as to whether perfect replication of those lines would still make authenticate currency, since the map makes the territory, the code to make the currency, etc. etc. and MFA questions of whether painting a drip is the same as a drip. The most interesting question is "Hey, what's under there?" covered by authentication lines. Did Sietsema expose his underwear showing his own very-technically-unaccomplished painting or is it very technically reproduced copy of an unaccomplished painting? The main point is we like looking at dead things and wondering if they can still be considered life.

Martin Puryear at Matthew Marks

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A small shift in Puryear's formalism leaves it looking wildly less conservative as a superannuated contemporary moves reactionarily backwards to meet it, an unradical contemporary in which any Stadelschulite handed these objects, packaged à la mode instead of as craft, would look “fresh;" fresh as septuagenarian's handiwork.

See too: Transatlantic Transparency at Mathew ; Martine Bedin, Mai-Thu Perret at Fondation Speerstra