Magali Reus at Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Deurle

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Reus is exemplar of the cartoonification of the world. Everything convertible to plastic, printable. "tradition was wiped out by the invention of capitalist plastic. Labor was reduced to work, and craft became manufacturing processes, became laser cut wood, CNC milled blocks, a thousand interns on call. Suddenly your dreams could be injection molded. Ostensibly." Now the chore becomes pressing print, of everything on everything, Paintings are already printed on totes to toilet paper so why not a wooden spool? The algorithm combines and consumer clicks value. The artist becomes the algorithm in a society that doesn't know what it wants. The great recombinator. Post Rachel Harrison blowing up the mall - it returns as souvenirs. It is not the artist's "semantic ambivalence" - it is the world's. The world is stupid and functioning, and art we are given we are said to deserve. 

See too: Darren Bader at Andrew Kreps, Sam Pulitzer at House of Gaga, Sanya Kantarovsky, Camille Blatrix at Modern Art, Rachel Harrison at Whitney Museum

Karla Black at Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens

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Candy coat the thing you need to swallow.

Carol Bove, Carlo Scarpa at Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens

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So as to encounter the whole no individual thing could be too interesting, Modernist Architecture's elegance was blankness sliding eyes away from any particular to encounter an entirety, but Scarpa's bent version was filled with particularities, rather than decoration, as a means to emphasize itself. The awkwardness inscribed the elegance, like all those supermodels with strabismus. And this Particularness is the commons between the two, a hyptrophied aspect of modernism looking baroque within its narrow view, everything overly attended to.  Bove's looking not so much plain but obsessive, fetishistic attention toward the display, like the objects are beautiful but wouldn't the objects be more beautiful if they were wearing some organic leather strapping or tied down.

See too: Matthew Brannon at Casey Kaplan, Venice: Thea Djordjadze at The Arsenale