Max Brand at Harkawik

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Brand soup is better than generic? The same contents with a different emphasis. An evolution of today's trends: Abstraction AND surrealism. Surrealism as abstraction. An abstraction of. Any sticker placed on these paintings would affect it none. Perhaps that's what makes them great. Like a clown punching bag, no matter what you did, it would not make the painting better or worse, the clown returns to take another from you.

Max Brand at Galerie Bernhard

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If you rolled a piece of silly putty across the newspaper of Painting's history, you'd have Brand. The paintings are worn, patinated with the accumulated hands of artists, like the graffiti at painting's urinal. Grave rubbings of history, frottage of so many corpses, the accumulated seed some primordial stew whose clean up rag is molding, beautifully, colors. Eventually congealing some fetal cartoon life. Brand's moving away from the neanderthal hamfists of say Joe Bradley puts him closer to Sergei Jensen's vintagification - the washing of fabrics for softness, stains like well-used blankets, the kleenex of history, the teenage folder, everything adolescent, sticky.


See too: Sergej Jensen at dépendance, Ida Ekblad at Herald St, Ida Ekblad at Herald St (1)

Max Brand at Off Vendome

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"They manage to look refreshing but not unexpected" says R. Smith spit-firing painters to see what would stick attending the flavors in the stew. Seeing the soup for its referents and judging hazy memories of once distinct tastes roiling in the surface. The consommé so clarified as to not single out any one flavor, any one referent, everything so blended, you could just keep naming ingredients. Which is where we're at today. Soup easy to mass produce, a base prepared in advance can be used to a support a wide and readily available ingredients on its surface.


see too: Sanya Kantarovsky at Marc Foxx, Joanne Greenbaum at Crone, Vittorio Brodmann at Halle Für Kunst Lüneburg, Heather Guertin at Brennan & Griffin,

“S.O.A.P.Y. III” at What Pipeline



From Frankfurt to London to now Detroit, it's a M. Carpenter marketing campaign that so many of the cool crowd attempt (with 1/10th the irony) since their elders networked success, a still physically viral necessitude in spite globally flat internet.
S.O.A.P.Y.’s magick and allegorical dungeon-capitalism acts as a fictitious umbrella, an excusable space not bound by art’s habitus. Things can get wacky when you’ve pre-excused them. So here we get a sort of 8-bit RPG of fetishized magic art-items. Healing amulets, and green orc-sax players, Parasols of Lambo-shadow, and wands and crystals galore - arranged in a grid like so many early nintendo adventurer’s inventories. Punning on the Städelschule materialist-surrealism. Art-Magick. Painting’s square like the battle screen. You’ve encountered the leather pants nihilist.
The excuse works, we get some campy-mysticism not normally allowed, but its a style laden on top the assemblage of tropes not meant to be taken too seriously, a sort of fresh air.