Ulrich Wulff at Alfonso Artiaco

(link)

In the past Wulff has painted some of the ugliest paintings known. Comprised entirely of arabesque frills and clowns, it was a jesteral abstraction whose decorative whims unlimited its movement into wild aesthetic territory. Now here there are organizing principles, which, possibly through restraining the expressive frill, seem docile. Painting is made obedient. Painter management systems. The gesture is contained. Brushtroke and painter, kept in cage, an almost pleasant law and order. The painter should only be allowed so much.

Cheyney Thompson at Raucci/Santamaria

(link)

Guyton printed and Thompson laughed. Losing your hands to the printing press was nothing compared to losing self to an algorithm, a standardized operations to create "content."  Coming from the genre of subjective's loss to evermore reflexive systems mirroring the structures they sat inside. Bochner to Asher. But Thompson's mirror churned through information processes arbitrarily translating randomized position into codified color produced as beautifully arbitrary as "pollen floating on water." From 3 standard stoppages to E. Kelly to McCollum arbitrariness in abstraction has a long history, and Markov Cheyney precipitating its endgames using of models that turn code into money.

Max Neuhaus at Alfonso Artiaco

(link)

The velvet redundancy of installation shots. Within contemporary dispersion a pretension displaying requisite-part-of-the-club-ness, (euphemized: “ part of the conversation”) of a gallery system becoming an anachronism of old fashioned authentication, Here the invisibility of the works themselves present an overtly extravagant hyperbolization of its decorum framing images and sounds drawn to explicate another world entirely.

see too : Florian Hecker & John McCracken at Künstlerhaus KM- , Midway Contemporary Art