Dana Lok at Clima, Milan

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Coy maybe, or a little cute, but a least they follow their own path into a strange terrain of their own whatever. That's how a subject appears? It's all we ask, even terribly. 

Bill Hayden at Federico Vavassori

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Damn remember Real Fine Arts? The website is gone so you can't. Wish I could. What a run. Too bad. Our memory has gotten so short. Perhaps the memory that it happened is better than the warts of photography. Better to have the option to delete oneself. Because now the drawings just look unaccounted for, look really great. 

Bernhard Schobinger at Martina Simeti

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At a time when so many artists are working to backfill their materials with "content" the press release elucidates as ingredient lists, it's become an unironic Pearoefoam so prevalent. So it's a point to note Preciousness is arbitrary. Diamonds, the internet will tell you, are artificially rare, demand conjured by corporations excellent marketing. Which, is all preciousness artificial? Conjured through the technique of aura production? Everything is Pearoefoam? Are artists the industrialization of aura? Anyway its a point made clear here, jewels made from the mine of arbitrary standards, as good as any other here, better even, these jewels were invented. 

Stella Zhong at FANTA

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Hard to make fetish baroque. Baroque require excess, a quantity which supersedes the detail-attention of the fetishist. The fetishist doesn't want a thousand feet, he prefers one exquisite foot to totemize, as mother. This exhibition's attempt to make sculptural fetish an ever expanding orgy relies continually segmenting space and scales which fractally segments and conceals. So you can be alone with your feet and still have them in the hundreds, precious held each. 

Less Pumhösl than a Wurtzian Cronenberg sort: B. Wurtz

Yngve Holen at Spazio Maiocchi

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No one really knows how the algorithm works, what happens inside the box is beyond attempts of research. We are told the machine is a conglomerate larger than any one person is capable of understanding. In it appears a larger entity. We are incapable to understand the monolith. Technology replaces the dark forest we once feared. This isn't a particularly modern feeling. The sublime is now stupid ungovernable boxes, those that dictate our lives. And we stand before them, cut in half, to expose that there is no ghost. Just an indifference that hurts, needs our thought as comfort blanket to wrap its vacuum chill. we hold object-like-skulls to our own crania, ask painting for meaning. Holen's techno-voids are merely translations of art's own interpretation-box attitude. This is art, altars. An interpretable fount, an empty skull that against all known understanding still feels to give back stupidly chills. 

Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg at Gio Marconi

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Getting tired of flower art, all seeming to do the same thing, excess excused. Flowers are their dramatic overage, that's the point, they're sex on a stick. The more pornography the better, when it comes to flowers, there's fields of it, empty like porn. "an orgy of saccharine beauty." So they drip and spray and amass color and form as no other object could handle. You wouldn't do this to your mother's face. But flowers take it. An object absorbing all artistic abuse.

Flowers: “Miranda” at Anat Ebgi & “A Change of Heart” at Hannah Hoffman, Willem de Rooij at Arnolfini,  Tom Allen at Chris Sharp Gallery, Tom Allen at Air de Paris, Tom Allen at Lulu, 

Simon Fujiwara at Fondazione Prada

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It is easy to say what's good/affective about these. It is ideology uncanny, the way the arcade is the cultural mythos machine, made topsy turvy. Fujiawara's production of meaning is a big cartoon factory. Artists blow up a mall, rearrange cultural debris. Edutainment gone haywire: Dr. Frankenstein reanimates a trade show. The ideology of display into comedy for it. Etc. Learning, but like, stupidity is the funhouse of meaning. Which the exhibition was always the factory of, and we ostensibly liked this, meaning, and ostensibly this was good meaning, rather than ideology. But this became two meats hard to slice. The ability to construct meaning itself became the ideologic function of the gallery that its look lended. And here it was in a kaleidoscope. 

"This is how my world looks – diverse, confusing, exciting, incomprehensible, fearful – and I can only make work that is close to my experience. ... And then, from that, how we construct meaning for ourselves now, amid those ruins. Throughout everything we haven’t lost a desire for meaning or belonging but maybe in a ‘post-meaning’ world we can still have a meaningful existence. I’m trying to understand if this is possible or if the search for it is meaningless."

There's no truth here, just the carnival of experience, fun house made from the funhouse glass of cultural knowing, the warbled mirror of art's stuttering experience. 

see too: Simon Fujiwara at Dvir(1), Simon Fujiwara at Dvir(2)

Nazgol Ansarinia at Raffaella Cortese

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Fragments, parts separated from their lives, they always seem beautiful, alien. They seem wounded, ominous, their meaning is fractured, in ways that can't be put back together. We place these objects to our foreheads and ask for their secrets, contemplate their use, rotate them in our minds. But this was their use, to be pressed to foreheads, interminably silent, hear the ocean in your head. 

Fredrik Værslev at Gio Marconi

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"The electrified corpse of symbolism." Made to jitter again. Not just flags, stained flags the audience gasps, amazed at the corpse twitching. The symbols already existed, the idea already existed in Johns, but these paintings pull the corpse out for display again. A dead thing. Stare into the abyss, the abyss give back to the theater of your skull: this is called Prisoner's Cinema, a lack of stimulation causes the perception of phantasms. We write 10,00 word essays expounding the ghosts. They're symbols. They point. That's what they do. You perceive a content, like a corpse. But that's not grandma laying there.

See too: Fredrik Værslev at Bergen Kunsthall, Fredrik Vaerslev at Centre d’Art Contemporain Passerelle

Mario Schifano at Gio Marconi

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How many paintings can we peel from the skin of the monochrome and still call them distinct, still able to peel individuals off similarity, like one more rabbit out of the hat, one more clown out of the car. Still claim a new clown, monochrome. The white of Ryman was a constant to show what else was variable, and the monochrome is proof: there will always be something more, you cannot eliminate content despite trying, it will reappear bearing some distinction, some difference. If not merely any marker of its making*, then the projection screen of everything rolling around in the head of the viewer, the Pierre Menard of painting. Interpretation is interminable, invincible.

*These monochromes have a 60s materiality and a painter who "brought a rock’n’roll spirit to the art world .. He drove around Rome in a Rolls Royce and had countless girlfriends, the best-known of whom was the model-cum-actress, Anita Pallenberg, later the lover of both Brian Jones and Keith Richards from the Rolling Stones" making these party painted monochromes.


see too: Sarah Ortmeyer at Chicago Manual of Style, Kaspar Müller at Museum im Bellpark, Seven Reeds at Overduin

Gerold Miller at Cassina Projects

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This belongs to a genre, "Problems in painting" which we could trace through a legacy of modernism and concerns with flatness, frames, and for-art's-sake to today's endless ways to begaze your navel, painting. Weren't Stella's black paintings just navels-en-abyme. Torture in the ontologic sense.  Painting for painting's... what? How many ways can Dr. Frank reassemble the corpse and we still call it painting? I say this as someone who thinks Jo Baer is criminally underrated. It's perhaps one of those weird quirks that it cannot be just that the problems are interesting, the answers unfortunately have to be too.

Genoveva Filipovic at Federico Vavassori

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The scatlogical undertones of most painting goes unremarked, its primordial stuff, energized by libido, as dirt suspended in goo, as some form of infantile creation, of selling dirty diapers.
"It would be an interesting history correlated, the desublimation of painting, its id-ification, from the surrealist's subconscious to Pollock's becoming "nature" to finally the triumph of neanderthalism (of say Joe Bradley) the history of men's important doodle and the mythology of the infantilized artist. We must care for him, them, genius whose diapers we exchange."
Filipovic's "toy with the white cube’s capacity to render a pile of [brown stuff] expensive." according a Frieze review of her Vilma Gold show. Not even Shimizu's were this shitty even when expressly painting it, and people eating it. But provisional crappiness here seems the point, the reverse digestion of painting's normal sublimation turned to shit.

Oliver Osborne at Gió Marconi

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Paint like burnished leather. Rubbed, treated. The point is the surface, a shallow pool both lets sight in and reflects us. We can theorize an internality, a subject inside, however privy we are not to it. A surface that warbles in inkblots. A "parsimonious difference." What do you see, what do you project. It's a new type of formalism where content is created then rejected, cancelled by the imbroglio of meaning. A depiction tampered, we stare at. 


See too: Caleb Considine at Massimo de Carlo

Luigi Ontani at Massimo De Carlo

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The "hypertrophic imagination of the artist".
The excessive [...] breeding monsters, unnecessary invention, a bit too. A hangnail bleeding the excess of art, much.

Amelie Von Wulffen at Gio Marconi

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"She utilizes the brown hued bluntness of the German palette – a favorite of 18th century genre painters through to Anselm Kiefer – as if it were a genre all its own."

That's pretty good. And one would wish for a listing of von Wulffen's does with color and painting that feel so egregiously like painting trauma, its history of abuses, like that bic pen blue that smears out of the clouds, the eruptions of full ROYGBIV rainbows of colors unnecessary. Painting is filled with horror, the calls coming from inside the house.

Anthea Hamilton at Kaufmann Repetto

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The armpit always seemed like a place where god got a bit lazy. A sort of hole patched with the divine equivalent of Bondo, a sort of universal goo, leaving one wondering if body builders or gymnast armpits are an equally sponge material. God's conceptual flab. Like when Searle called the butt one of design's more embarrassing moments, but Pesce's bum wasn't embarrassing, though maybe a means of forcing embarrassment and mockery to those prudish and uninterested in humanizing an aperture, entryway. The butt was more like design's armpit, a confusing gendering of spaces, giving them a little but too much "body,"  that Anthea's interest seems more in line with in the in-between and confusing spaces of humor seriousness history and whatevers, closest to maybe Nauman in the ability to "teeter on knife point" between irony and earnest, a sort of conceptual flab of reference.

“Fantasy is a place where it rains” at Fanta Spazio

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Framed to the architecture rather than aligned to the artworks the document appears as looking off into some middle distance, gazing longingly out, some sea out there. The photograph looking at nothing in particular embodies your own moments interiorly lost and stuporous, half-smile leaking under your unfocused eyes, capturing all the air and aura of the gallery like a wreath.

Lisa Ponti at Federico Vavassori

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There isn't a single photo of a painting, just install shots where white space crowns, a frame of real estate stands in for gilding, lighting like a halo. Then weirdly you can find some of them here, a 95 year old artist on A4.



See too:Brian Calvin at Le Consortium, Florian Hecker & John McCracken at Künstlerhaus KM- , Midway Contemporary Art

Francesco Vezzoli at Fondazione Prada

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Make it big, sprawling. Polish the room. Carpet, lighting, stages, print banal things huge, patterns everywhere. Funhouse. "Historical" references like put through a paper shredder. Place other's art on the walls to gird your own. So there's something to look at. Like history in a disco ball. Have fun with it, the carnival. More, more, more, how do you like it, how do you like it?

Will Benedict at Gio Marconi

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The strong scent of banality, the groan you feel escaping, The alienation these so cherish to conjure, Their hyper-ennui, a dissociation. Desensitization occurring "emotional response is repeatedly evoked in situations in which the action tendency that is associated with the emotion proves irrelevant or unnecessary." Arbitrariness is a terror. You can't even remember what it felt like to be healthy.


Will Benedict at Overduin & Co., Will Benedict at Bortolami