Lily van der Stokker at Gallery van Gelder & Emil Michael Klein at Galeria Federico Vavassori

LVDS at GVG, EMK at GFV

Wacky line day down at CAD. One line is trivial loose air, the other a serious river sculpted line. Which of course is false. Van Der Stokker's PR wants to impress the laborious hand process of inscribing all that nothing. Emil Michael Klein's lines may be as arbitrary as any, the whims of the painter, the water tracing the softest riverbed. Why do we attach an authenticity to the drab? A nothing to doodles? What is important finding a reason to autograph the picture, any scrawl will do. There's difference but no reason to see them differently, no difference at all.  

Nick Mauss at Emanuela Campoli

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The original frizz of architectural decor in its becoming-painting has seemed to have just become painting. But it's a mirror! Okay. A different substrate, a little looser. Like the wildfire aha of painted televisions, a new substrate ostensibly is new ground. Not really. But the reversal is comedy. Painters today don't start with a blank canvas, they start with collector-abstraction and work backwards. The gesture is obligated, the choice is what can hold it.

Hardy Hill at Fanta-MLN

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Artists' threat on the body is implicit. After centuries of Picasso tearing scalps, Matisse's pipe bent people, Yuskavage's overripe ovoids, Nguyen's surgical cosmetics - we feel the artistic blackmail. It's why Hill's always feel like forensic files to the corpse mangled offscreen. There's something too precious, too sentimental to Hill's eye, to the body that we treat like artistic meat, the grotesque arabesque violence outside.

See too: stress positions of beauty, Tala Madani, Violence Against Faces

Claude Rutault at Federico Vavassori

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"two canvasses mounted on stretchers, of identical size and shape, painted the same colour as the wall on which they hang,"

Rutault, as if painting were some side project of interior design. An object springing from walls, architecture's mushroom. Whether or not this is true, the thought is better. You don't have to think about Painting, instead you get to think of air. You get to think of a painting that serves something else. It is pleasant to watch painting be useless like this. 

Zoe Leonard at Galleria Raffaella Cortese

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Like the Calendar's mechanization of time, photography too asserts its frame as an artificial blocking. Of the world it renders like little cubes of meat, morsels. Of life that it embalms. Real geopolitical borders if you know what I mean. So the attempts to blur these lines with the filmic language of frames, with TIME, an attempt to give artifical motion, motion, life, is an admittance or benevolence, to the world butchered into cuts. Suppose you were about to be executed, which size axe would you choose for your piecemealing?

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.