Reina Sugihara at Misako & Rosen

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A deployed ability to resemble. Allude. Hint. Vaguely suggest. This makes an inkblot.  I see a nightmarish tide pool with deep crabs and horror. You see Arthur Dove and your mother. A dark pool for a viewer's reflection. A John Marin watercolor, a corpse of something expensive. 

"But Dohi's resemble, recall unplaceable things, which is our politics now. Resemblance was dirty back then, we wanted purity in forms, because clouded abstraction led to impure thoughts. Why do we desire allusive formalism now? Fecteau, Baghramian, Balema, Nagle, et al. Is still a latent surrealism? The shifting space of ambiguous 'clouds' saying that one looks like a rabbit but never knowing it."

Suggestions: Vincent Fecteau at greengrassi, Vincent Fecteau at Misako & Rosen, Lui Shtini at Kate Werble, Ron Nagle at Modern Art, Nairy Baghramian at Walker Art Center?, Nairy Baghramian at Museo Tamayo, Nairy Baghramian at Marian Goodman Larry Poons at Michael Jon & Alan, Lucy Bull at High Art, Olga Balema at High Art, Olga Balema at High Art (2)

Portals Misako & Rosen, Tokyo

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Goya painted some black paintings but even the well fed generals contain hell. A pallor in dough. Looking into the fire in a Night on Bald Mountain are nudes that burn. The Maja's autopsy. A fire vacant like Goya's eyes.

Motoyuki Daifu at Misako & Rosen

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An odd fact that we let dogs piss all over the world. It's, like, totally cool. "It will rain someday," thinks the dog owner, letting god take the reins on this mess. Dogs emit the color of hazard, signaling their species' - on the whole - dehydration. 

But here the artist splashed water - it's not pee - which, I don't know, I guess complicates it something. The Pollockian waypoint: dribbled abstraction and marking Guggenheim property, your territory, drunkenly, yelling "I am nature" to the policeman explaining, "you can't pee here, Pollock, dog."

Masaya Chiba at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery

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The zany installation needs to make comeback. That science fair exhibit gone wrong of the 90s/00s. Jason Rhoades, Cloaca, Hello Meth Lab in the Sun, Christoph Büchel, etc. Everything looked like a laboratory, an industrial factory, used conveyor belts. Rhoade's PeaRoeFoam predicted the late 2010s process orientated abstraction as a giant comedy - art's industrialized factory of charisma, a caricature of the production of aura. It was also enjoyable. Something about the science fair animates and comedies the ideologic process of art's chambers. The conveyer of viewer, the turtle munching mulch, the paintings aloft, the didactics and visible/invisible arrows. Look here, learn this. "You can sit in this chair." Thanks. That the imprisoned turtle is the stand-in for us isn't even that far fetched, just like Foucault said, society is a...

Trevor Shimizu at Misako & Rosen

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(Someone confirmed, this might count as a water lily. As impressionism. Which is too bad, the prediction is only fun when its suspended... let's say this is post-impressionist water lilies.)

I enjoy late Monet, before his cataracts surgery, the rusting of his pastiche into yellow lumps, all but blind. Their gross mismanagement of color failing to materialize his prettiness. You watch a master, hampered, fail. Late Monet, like Soutine painted a colonoscopy. Shimizu's, ditching the coprophagia, have almost the opposite but equally compelling problem, a prettiness for which there is no reason - you watch failure produce horrible beauty. 

J. Parker Valentine at Misako & Rosen

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Lines, they delineate. So, failing to produce the object, the quasi is given to viewer, an inkblot, a form they construct.  "difficult to articulate" the PR says, becomes painting of a mirage, handing the goo to a viewer left to sort spaghetti formed lines like tea leaves in you all along. Pareidolia.

Shimon Minamikawa at Lulu Annex

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"fraught tradition of painting and repetition. One thinks of everything from Morandi’s heartbreakingly beautiful depictions of vases and bottles to On Kawara’s dry, no frills paintings of dates. The German painter Peter Dreher’s commitment to painting the same exact drinking glass for decades comes to mind."

would like to think of CAWD in this way, repetition, attempting to bracket something, everyday looking at the same glass. 

See too: Glass

Richard Aldrich at Misako & Rosen

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No matter how much you make fun of these paintings, they just sort of take it, like dummies, bouncing right back up. Painting as a sponge for blows. Perhaps the best painting is capable of all the lashing in the world. Call these paintings stupid. And they are... but they take it exceedingly well, seem even noble in it. Some paintings whither because they fear stupidity.

Vincent Fecteau at Misako & Rosen

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The muscle car was - if by name alone - intended to resemble a body. Exuded the "muscle" it contained, sleek and rippling with. The image seeped into culture and the fast cars took on different appearances, insectoid, technical. But those muscled images remain latent, in the cultural ether, and Fecteau seems to pluck and rearrange some subconscious forms of these chopped and reassembled, looking like something you vaguely recall but can't place. Like a google algorithm trying to invent a car part, like a human recalling some vague sexual attachment to a physical objet before understanding what a body was for.

Fergus Feehily at Misako & Rosen

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Everyone loves Feehily, they are like a breeze. Against everyone else's returns to modernism Feehily's could seem one more scuzz on the pond to extract any further oxygen from it. Instead perhaps like Raoul De Keyser a mining for some odd uncanny version. There is a bit of adorability to their off-elegance. Paintings like the underdog, we root for them. Like wearing a fur-coat and a runny-nose. "in micro mode: in accumulations of near-subliminal pictorial events that reward an unhurried, particle-magnifying gaze."

see too: Raoul De Keyser at Inverleith House

Nathan Hylden at Misako & Rosen

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paintings were always trying to point elsewhere, reference their previous selves, point at the other, steal brushstrokes from each other, leave sprayed paint ghosts as traces of the other, overlapped and reinserted to another, silkscreened, printed, cut, traced, photoed and industrially processed, continually turning the heads every elsewhere until finally we are looking at the floor - that apparently gave rise to at least some of the paintings - looking for the original that Hylden tries to defeat, burying it under it reference until there maybe isn't, it is dead and in the pile that hides it, a mirrored floor showing something new?

Erika Verzutti at Misako & Rosen

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Material excess, crust, small holes cut in flesh to place tiny stones. Little pimples to pop, nubbins,  to squeeze out excess, or pull an ingrown hair from under tender flesh. Feel bodily presence inside squares. Cut carrots in your belly button. Fill your ears with plastic beads, your salivary glands with pearls, your tear ducts with coral. Connect several puzzle pieces to feel that satisfying soft click. Fill your colon with concrete. Easily fit the average lightbulb's glass end into an open mouth to find it cannot come back out, the skeletal structure of your jaw is one way, leading to a series of horrible wet youtube videos. Remove the concrete to find a sculpture of your colon. How many apples do you think we could fit inside him? Surgically removed hangnails. Ingrown toenails. Rubbing mother's bunions. Rug burn so bad your uncle weeps. Reliquaries of saint's bones. Red swollen earlobes pinned to potatoes. Pizza face leaking. Red boogers wiped on pants. The entirety of childhoods perforations leaving a body like Spongebob. Pumice stones for exfoliant. Cartoon meat like cake. A pound of flesh removed without a drop of blood, just some sensitivity around the glands. I replaced my cheek with a smooth stone.

Kaoru Arima at Misako & Rosen

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Brutalization of the human visage an ever occurring painting theme. Since early modernism human features bludgeoned to bloom bruise bouquets, or apply rictus like geometries, portraits of a stroke. On and on painters rushing to do injustice to portraits.  It became a joke so safe it could be featured in children’s movies, and so you've got potatoes exclaiming, “Hey look at me, I’m Picasso." These aren’t Bacon, for whom, as Deleuze saw through so quickly, the face was subregister to the thing-head, the meat slab head. Here, the face is more figurative idea, an outline, a Jawlensky like framework for which to hang wanton libidinal paint.  A Martin Creed portrait mistake that continues long past the child crying for it to stop, I mean he’s already dead. And but so the joke so played out, that today our countenance used as a rack for paint is a small irony. We find its horror almost playful, cute, even interesting, a learned tolerance for pain.

See too : Heather Guertin at Brennan & Griffin , Joanne Greenbaum at Crone , 

Raoul De Keyser at Inverleith House

Yuki Okumura at Misako & Rosen

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The brilliance of Okomura’s Wiel’s Residency’s factory outsourced with children’s content beautiful in its ephemeral ease and imaging of pre-knowledge renditions of what was inside, loaded with imagastic metaphor in a baroque and dumb carnival, totally fun, now reaches the other romantic extreme of its emptiness in the trademark color “Cerebral Greyness” of 70’s conceptualism in waiting for Godot desolation, and a slightly off tone of the usual neutral language of its wall didactic.

Nathan Hylden at Misako & Rosen



The most important thing today is it look like contemporary art. That none mistake it as other.
Hylden’s contingent indexical, or indexically contingent, whatever, a lexical strategy, as long as those words are used in context of cold clean conceptual look, the lookbook of contemporaneity, the fallout of the GuytonWalkerPriceSmith crescendo 10 years ago now already, when all the neo-cold-minimalists started running around, Cheyney Thompson, Quaytman, et al. and Hylden too, Orchard’s death and the rise of Abreu. And everyone was talking about conceptual painting strategies and forgetting about Frank Stella and Bernard Frieze, because it looked different, and discovered new words to go along with it, Laura Owens in a new suit, a new techno-irruption of some new neo-liberatory strategy, hands off technical perfection, as if to say it was beyond the artist; as if all witnessing the new evacuation of embarrassing subjectivity at the hands of capitalist artistic production, which we were, and every one of them finally with hands free to greet it.