Nathan Hylden at Misako & Rosen

(link)

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?

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.