Catharine Czudej at Meredith Rosen Gallery

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From last exhibition's moribund gloom to this one's concrete clowning provides a whiplash we could call slapstick. The comic whateverness. These clown jewels. But like last time eventually someone turns on the light, cleans up, eventually the parachute disappears and we're left with with walls forced to carry expensive rocks, no levity at all. No balloon, just concrete. No criticality, just painting. The sign eventually wins over its irony, there will just be jewel. We have to learn this again and again and again we never learn. 

Anna Uddenberg at Meredith Rosen Gallery

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Cronenberg baby furniture? American BDSM Airlines x BabyBjörn? You can make distinct things look like other things because the microtization of affect becomes an all encompassing sign system. Think of the distinction between "tactical" t-shirt, "sport" t-shirt, "yoga" t-shirt. The detailing designates the meaning - both real and fake at the same time. Meaning emerges like gender identity. My baby is a tactical baby. Mine is liberal. A performance without origin. So of course the high end sex toys begins to look like baby toys - they are catering to the tastes of the same buyer - who assembles a closet of identity, no different from meaning. These affective layers are what AI is so good at spinning. Certain AI generators ban the  word "Cronenberg." His is too powerful. You start to see things that were always there. The "suggestification" of art. 

Theory of the couch.

The reason we've gotten into upholstery, into couches, chairs and gotten into sleeping bags, is that they infer us. They contain the ghost of the human they were made for. Every chair is a bodily innuendo. And the pervert knows what the decorous don't.

Gowoon Lee at Meredith Rosen Gallery

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An enhanced interrogation on our own childhood's wet eyed tube intake. Art History's torture of Disney rodents: Oldenburg, Foulkes, Pensato, McCarthy, Beeple, et al.  Attaching artistic electrodes to the commodified rabbits and amplifying pain. Our moment today: "the body reappears and it appears as a cartoon, which we're mad about." Why? Abstraction: "Our bodies extrapolated from the growing prevalence of data and numbers domineering discussions of humans. The "broad picture" we use for governance. People as populations. Everything feels like a cartoon in this virtuality because you can do great violence to it. A million jobs lost, a million jobs gained. Tom whacks at Jerry with a mallet like an axe. Jerry distends."

"...comedy premised on slapstick’s violence upon the real, stretching the real into a comic absurdity, teasing a threat to break it, which rationalizing this discrepancy forced laughter in children...What may be interesting about this show is that we have defined the moment, the kids grown on cartoons have arrived and their childhoods have coincidentally, absurdly, become the accurate depictions of the way the world has begun to feel, and will soon become generic, but at least we'll get to stop repeating ourselves."

Stefan Tcherepnin at Meredith Rosen Gallery

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Is this the tasteful turn, Sesame street puberty blossoming an arabesque adulthood's cash in? This flying spaghettis bear resemblance to the monsters both: the muppet eyeball becomes painterly logo, brand to the artist, because stitching alligators to cotton improves la cost. And the noodle monster to prove there is no god. 

Past: Stefan Tcherepnin

Guillaume Bijl at Meredith Rosen Gallery

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Wearing a mask of your own face. When does the movie set become actual?  An office attempts to represent an office. This nonfunctional office, dead, is the uncanny, painted corpse. A"transformation" of space in capitalism.The fun here is how easily it works, the distinguishing signs among commodities. The difference between a tarp, a trash bag and tent. Mere signs. Don't bring Baudrillard into this. This is not theory, but funhouse, fun. 

For many, a film's believability is important ... to maintain its dream-thrall and for its duration become real. We understand fiction as able to - even momentarily - become actual. And in [x's] work seeing false things we know have the power to become real is its humorous anxiety. The various distances from "realness" are its multiple punchlines. At what point are the arrangements are decor and at what point it is the authentic living room.... At what point does our decor function as a reflection of society and at what point do our living rooms produce their own image for Hollywood and your neighbors to reproduce, and at what point does suspension of disbelief just become permanent.

See too: Guillaume Bijl at Nagel Draxler, William Leavitt at MAMCO