Mitchell Syrop at Croy Nielsen & Glenn Ligon at Regen Projects

(Croy Nielsen , Regen)

The artworld's relation to its signs can be confusing. Here one shouts its empty signs, a sound like empty metal struck, the other attempts to deplete its referent to nausea. Both a protest. Different relations to iconography. Both truisms, but of nowhere equal value. Cuffing these two exhibitions to each other to each eat the other, this is CAD at its curatorial finest.

see too : Mitchell Syrop at Midway Contemporary Art , John Baldessari at Marian Goodman

Mitchell Syrop at Midway Contemporary Art



A Baldessari-like dissonance of image and text, placing Ruscha non-sequiturs in the grey palette of conceptualism to be less self-ironizing, like the 80's ads it mimics. “Watch it. Think it.” The barrage of advertorial propaganda berates in hollow declarative, the nonsense of the advertorial address. An obfuscation highlighting that all advertising is obfuscation. That despite enticement into reading its premise all language slips, but like the lifting of too heavy weight we become stronger at the reading of advertising nonsense. Like the yearbook photos we get acclimated to the alienating distance created by once familiar subjects.