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