Zelmira Rizo-Patrón at CENTRAL FINE

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The aura becomes overpowered, illumination at 600hp. Everything begins to blow out, dissolve, etherealize, until paint becomes markings in virtuality. The mechanized halo becomes the ground to reality, its connection to power.

Hadi Fallahpisheh at CENTRAL FINE

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Ah the virtualization of our white space made manifest with a blown out shutter. Letting the light in. That vertigo you feel when the floor falls out, little rooms traded for infinite white void, us floating. This is the world Fallahpisheh draws in photographically, would be the read here. But this is the world we all draw in, this is our world, this is just more literal.

NADA Miami 2019

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Art Basel Miami Beach 2019

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I mean holy bright and bubbly rainbows, humongous goopy aluminum, and just overall a phantasmagoria of oreo-like stuf, too much stuf, everything looking like a stop sign, like a battering ram. Maybe a yearlong moratorium on red, or rainbows, or are we armoring our emotions against a world ending 2020.


See too: CAD'S NADA BASEL MIAMI

Jose Zuniga at Central Fine

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Gaugin covered his pedophilia in colors more tasteful than the brashness of van Gogh or even Cezanne. Perhaps erupting in syphilitic sores made promiscuous color seem gratuitous, requiring some restraint, some decorum. A fear of wonton rashes expressing itself in total palette control. And so Gaugin's color is academic, goody two shoes, annoying.
The obvious Schutz references probably have as much to do with who is being stolen from as anything, and its nice to see things stolen.

NADA Miami 2018

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The naive and the earnest that seem to be rising. That colorful stupidity that drips, clung to, stuck on, chunky. Even three years ago it seemed all materiality and cartoons, the first major drops of surrealism. Now figuration in awkward forms. Purvis Young still looks great, even as everyone tries to meet him, but most are done a disservice. But this is probably what the next 3 years have in store.


CAD'S 2017 NADA BASEL MIAMI

Terry Adkins at Institute of Contemporary Art Miami

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The NYTimes said they "evoked vanished histories," which seems accurate to their strange floating connections to the figures, and performers who like Adkins were intended to activate them, are no longer around. "Columbia (2007), for instance, is a circular piece of wood painted with as many layers of black enamel as LPs that blues singer Bessie Smith released on Columbia Records." Is information retained in after being destroyed in a black hole seems an apt question. The "recitals" label that he often used in place of "exhibition" is left to youtube-documentation, reinterpretations, stories. "An animistic approach to materials... when working with found materials I wait... for instance in my early stages I would go to junkyard. Junkyards have a lot of junk in them... identifying themselves has having potential to do something else... that is potential disclosure." Like attempts to carry forward history, connect the past, it all feels like lost civilization attempted to be touched.


see too: Melvin Edwards at Daniel Buchholz, Park McArthur at Chisenhale, Yngve Holen at Kunsthalle Basel, Cameron Rowland at Daniel Buchholz

CAD'S NADA BASEL MIAMI

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CAD posted over a thousand images today. While today was a special one, for the second year in a row no longer selecting the choice bits but publishing the full-nude of NADA and Basel, it presents CAD's crossroad in deciding between art documentation's curatorial highlighter or mass storage locker. Should CAD collect them all or just the right stuff. Miami has its limits, the full thing can be consumed, perhaps even be sorted through to find yourself, or us, but should our feed enlarge, put us at the limits of our stomachs produce the indigestion of our fracturing guts at just so much: taste superseded by amount, the tastemaker chef no longer matters in a trough, and we'd have to remove our lips glued to their hose and start our own sampling systems at the deluge. What is more profitable, feeding with the mass or attempting selection for high-end. Eventually the curator can't also represent the panopticon.


Correction: CAD didn't actually post the entirety of every booth, it appears some booths were selectively documented, for instance What Pipeline's booth (which doesn't have a link oddly) only had Quintessa Matranga work documented.


See too: CAD

Andre Pierre at Central Fine

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Devotional paintings, with the spatial depth of the iPad's home screen, allusive uploading to metaphysical planes, and all those icons arranged across that plane, an interface for that extra-dimensional locale that we plug into - "projections broadcasting their qualities onto this plane" - as our discarnate selves: "the priest, like the painter, is perhaps the manager of both realms," which, like app developers, are the most contemporary paintings.



See too: Emily Mae Smith at Rodolphe Janssen, Julien Ceccaldi at Jenny’s, “Äppärät” at Ballroom Marfa, Jana Euler at Galerie Neu & Portikus, Julien Nguyen at Freedman Fitzpatrick

Thomas Bayrle at Institute of Contemporary Art Miami

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The visual abhorrence is a disregard for normal ordering systems replaced with the horror vaccui: terrifying abuses of space. The clown is terrifying for his costume and false smile's replacing the social order of emotions with its hysteria, used repeatedly in horror genres, and these are the clowns of composition, of space. These are not kind things.


see too: Thomas Bayrle at dépendance, Rob Pruitt at MOCAD

Daniel Buren at Bortolami

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The ascetic refusal Buren's game of course eventually gives expression to Heimo Zobernig. Buren's game aimed outward as critique of the walls, someone would eventually see the opening and drive it at the art itself. Zobernig wetting the sand beneath feet to prove it was quicksand all along. The mental fart of Zobernig reairs in seeing these, Buren, in trying to ascertain the difference of one but tone. It's the Baderian question of a difference between fire bricks on floor and shrimp on foosball. Of the complete dumbness of objects, their utter asinity. Of course Zobernig needs Buren as his hostage in order to remain in negotiations, and Buren's calm cool continuation despite it, still striping away, is sort of endearing if not insane. The gallery, the institution, looks on with a smile.


see too: Darren Bader at Kölnischer Kunstverein,  Heimo Zobernig at Indipendenza, Heimo Zobernig at Kunsthaus Bregenz, Heimo Zobernig at Simon Lee

John Miller at Institute of Contemporary Art Miami

John Miller at Institute of Contemporary Art Miami

MILLER: Yeah, he’s very much into that. I think it’s just a generational difference, too. I know this from my students—they check out shows online all the time, they keep up with Contemporary Art Daily. So we might think, “Oh, this show was over there and this audience hasn’t seen it,” but younger artists, if they’re engaged, they’ve probably seen what’s available online. I always forget that because I’ve never gotten in the habit of looking at shows online. It’s just not something I do. But artists in their 20s and 30s are very much doing that.

WILLIAMS: I have to admit, I look at Contemporary Art Daily every morning. When I’m having coffee, I look at the New York Times and Contemporary Art Daily...

Math Bass at Michael Jon & Alan

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Virtual Iconographies. Unlike Wesley, whose paintings we look into, these paintings come at us. Painting in the virtual space that our world increasingly appears. Space becomes an information deployment system, and layout becomes highly organized studied and manipulated. Style becomes a corruption of the subject. This one becomes a Bloomingdales, but in past Bass's paintings have been individuated works reflecting the increasing prevalence the interface over the image. Icons become shorthand redirecting thought. We understand them implicitly, terrifyingly.


See too: Matthew Brannon at Casey Kaplan

Larry Poons at Michael Jon & Alan

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The boringness of Google's "Deep Dream" project was in making explicit the pareidolia friction latent, hidden in carpets and noise and always threatened distrust in seeing, those momentary misrecognitions and ghosts in corners. Humans are apophenic machines - made to "see things." The inkblot innuendo was an essential of abstraction that was far too impure for post-war painting to deal with, it would have limited abstraction to the mere human, like Cecily Brown's meaty innuendos, very untranscendent, when people were throwing around the possibility of universals. Op-art was a cheap imitation of the purer form's sanctity; Op-art rested on physiologic parlor tricks rather than the more strict and thus universal forms of abstraction that could communicate with dolphins and gods.


See too: Ann Veronica Janssens at Bortolami