David Snyder at Michael Benevento

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We used to see work like this all the time, the rickety Oursler, Rhoades, Dave Hullfish Bailey, Michael Smith wet cardboard kinda humor assemblage.  But in an artworld that today attempts to find visual artifacts for touch and feel, we see endless sculptures instead fetishizing its own materialism with a sort of Carol Bove like cabinet of the past's material curiosities: The lumpy crusty and rough hewn, sanded and polished. Whereas the above instead sort of nihilistically hate-loves its own trashiness, self ironizes with its own crudeness. And in a world where everything is being virtualized and drywalled this ironic janky-ness feels cruel; it is the dominant situation. So today we find comfort in artists preserving little butterfly collections of the "real" that at once may have been considered "authentic." The above coagulates all the crap of the demolishing today. That this isn't fun anymore.
I think this worked in the past because we didn't actually fear it, it was titillating, and now it is real fear. Check out The Guano here.

See too: Materialphilia

Mark Roeder at Michael Benevento

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The coyote is still hungry despite his body made of cartoon latex. It's implied in his pre-emptive dinner attire, fork knife bib. The coyote never never catches prey, as per the rule, never eats, his hunger is Sisyphean, law. Whatever rupture was in service to plot must repair itself by show's end, return tomorrow. Like the the 90s sitcom, like television prior on-demand, the situation self-repairs. A finite period affected by a specified illness. He had an episode. An eternal aphasia, amnesia. Narrative like gum. The 90s sitcom was a cartoon was a T1000, shotgun blasts to chest tomorrow a pristine police uniform to wait for Godot. Who what or where Godot matter none, the MacGuffin, the gold briefcase, the promise of a tomorrow always still returning. Surely the bird will never die, us eternal hungry.

Ann Greene Kelly at Michael Benevento

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You can't put a drain in anything without at least someone calling it Goberesque, and while home and hearth's quilted interiors rubbing against industrial production that wheels us might be explicitly Gober, AGK's is a more crustacean form which, as said last time, the gooey soft center threatens to exteriorize, spill its soft innards from something black, diatomaceous crabs, objects tension a possibility of their biomorphing, like loosing ones bowels in the bed, your body "goes lumpy," threatens structure, inside out, cream interiors, liquids draining in the bed.


see too: Group Show at Michael Benevento

Gina Beavers at Michael Benevento

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Appending painting the body it both does and does not want. Inflating it to bulbousness, we want body but not, you know... too much that would be a fetish, we want it sleek and slim for transaction, shipping, but here we find painting's brushwork metastasized and images become their nightmare: embodied. "How to achieve a flawless look with NO CAKE FACE."  There's an anxiety over the body, over the crust these harbor. We paint our bodies to appear as images and our paintings as bodied objects, a subject recently reoccurring in art but mainly through the things that infer it, euphemism. You see lots of chairs and innuendo, things to speak of the body but god forbid not show it, but in Beavers we find it explicit, too much, hanging out off its frame like a gut.


See too: Gina Beavers at Michael Benevento, Erwin Wurm at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, “Sitting Bone” at MAVRA

Martin Soto Climent at Michael Benevento & Yuji Agematsu at The Power Station

(link: Martin Soto Climent, Yuji Agematsu)

The enrapture of sensitivities, enwrapment, a container allowing movement, transaction. The Amazon box that allows its sales; cardboard a larger problem than the items it contains. The packaging that makes up the mass majority of waste.  Shouldn't we be speaking more of wrapper than "content", the mass majority of garbage that we have become hostages who love their captors to, enshrine odes to our hurt.

Nancy Lupo at Kristina Kite & Yuji Agematsu at Miguel Abreu, Yuji Agematsu at Real Fine Arts,  Yuji Agematsu at Artspeak, “May the Bridges I Burn Light the Way” at STANDARD (OSLO, Martín Soto Climent at Proyectos Monclova, Martín Soto Climent at DREI, Martin Soto Climent at Atlantis

Tariq Alvi at Michael Benevento

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Which look like enlarged thumbprints on the adverts, which sort of charicaturize what collage always meant to invoke, the touching, the importance of artistic labor, which we treat shamanistically, artists prove their touch with the assumption of our belief in it, channeling, arrange some truth out of cultural noise, which these are returned to.

Jesse Benson at Michael Benevento

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Making sense of the world through difference, categorization, exclusion, separating objects under different labels to make language, names, we, when paintings "involving the painstaking brushstroke-for-brushstroke hand replication of painted images" "re-painted by Benson with at least one visual deviation from the original" "and subtle gallery space alterations," difference and repetition becoming a see through thin, the asymptotic approach to image, falling towards the ground it aims at and missing, closer, closer, closer, feel vertigo.


Past: Jesse Benson at Michael Benevento

Group Show at Michael Benevento

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Like Chow's cephalopodic frames, Kelly's skeletal chandelier diatoms, or Rodriguez's chitinous crust, there's a hard exo to hold something viscous inside, in the dry waste something sentimental, organic, wet.


see too: Daniel Rios Rodriguez at Lulu, Milano Chow at Mary Mary

AR: Fred Lonidier at Michael Benevento

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Originally Posted: November 28th, 2016

Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

Joel Holmberg, Tory J. Lowitz at Michael Benevento

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How remarkable now if Monet had painted a toilet then. More concerned with the effect of snow at Giverny, or Rouen Cathedral, than the dawn's TP. Bonnard and Degas, bathmen sure, toilets no. There was a different sense of the sublime then, but the affect is the same. Hay or toilet stacks, the concern of the impressionist for the modern vista. Like Holmberg's laptop landscapes previously, or CNN epithets even before, an episodic "project" artist, a genre, like Lowitz's Ikebana, adherence to rules bent well, painting me like one of your frenchmen.

Michael E. Smith at Michael Benevento

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"Blood is sticky, often surprising people newfound to emergencies who encounter only bodies at pains to remind them of clean superficial images, but you can cut off your hands and glue them to your shoes." Bodily violence, its threat (a body to become goo as any other) is implicit to a work that treats materials as categorically promiscuous (surreal), e.g. if you can put Mario in the gallery sky or ocean's puffer fish under the warbled blue of summer tables, inflate them like footballs with whale ears, aren't you as wiling to place skulls at your knees. The disregard for the categorical order is like gore, crushing bodies.



See too: Michael E. Smith at Sculpture Center, Michael E. Smith at Zero, Michael E. Smith at Lulu, Michael E. Smith at Susanne Hilberry, Tony Conrad's Glass,

Fred Lonidier at Michael Benevento

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Politics aside, which at time when a president-elect we don't like is one of few who thinks such trade agreements are up for discussion while everyone we do like thinks any discussion spells, like, imminent economic apocalypse and a current president who we didn't like but now do but as the opposite rears head and who promised to but didn't enter discussion of said trade - and so what a time for this exhibition - making a real ideological pickle indeed, the work which can't be read with any real ease here and who probably could have stood long enough there, and which proves the book it needs, and so can't easily be read anytime soon and so we interpret it at the level of surface, form becoming the content, the affectual, having all sorts of relation to today, like watching debates with the sound off and which we sometimes did, it looks pretty good.

Gina Beavers at Michael Benevento

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Culture ate Warhol, and the body is spectacularly insane, but culture wants the body flat, glossy and sharp, like the Warhol which became fame, and Beavers reanimating the body's real corpus in such a culture that does not want it feels like real horror.


see too: Gina Beavers at Clifton Benevento,

Jesse Benson at Michael Benevento

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Whereas Jonas Wood highlights the rendered pressed through the grate of subjectivity (expression), Benson's accuracy in strategic non-expression, like Celmins or Sturtevant, the lack thereof (of expression), neutering the subjective, the closer it can be to being without qualities, is its psychedelic quality. The paintings warble in closeness to a reality that they fail to produce. The black object marks it with a wink, a game. The mistakes are its value. Banal and iridescent.


and so see too: Jonas Wood at David Kordansky , Mathew Cerletty at Office Baroque , Jana Euler at Kunsthalle Zürich

Christian Herman Cummings, Miriam Hanks-Todd at Michael Benevento



The smell of latex permeates the show, setting the scene in nausea unalleviated by the pepto bismal spread over pinkly over the desk, all adding up to a scrappy and roughshod abjection of framing, of frames' weakly pink made bodily in the dead flesh molding campy ventian blinds open to reveal doodled notations of a crude sexology, schematics, kid stuff in a Cronenberg version, a good show of gross stuff. Wounds as sex objects in the other room.