Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff at Reena Spaulings Fine Art

(link)

A conceptual beartrap, the inkblot asks that you spill forth the contents of your head with its innuendo as lure. What is the contents of your head.

Inkblot, inkblot, inkblot

All: Calla Henkel & Max Pitegoff

Rirkrit Tiravanija at MoMA P.S.1

(link)

A dinner enshrined, behind closed doors, enshrined in an image. Posted on this day of our own relational aesthetics, Christmas Eve. So when you pass your uncomfortable uncle the taters imagine the utopian world foods you could be enjoying. Think of art as your moral compass, the curry you could be sharing. 

We need someone to unpack what happened here. And this is it; this is the case study. From utopian salespitch to museum display.  The salespitch is enshrined as meaning. This is the machine of art. It's not quite history, not quite record. It's a series of things that point elsewhere, are elsewhere. But we're here. Asked to be elsewhere. A long explanatory text explaining the process of this. How art in its current regime promotes this, basically corrals all art into this, endless meaning elsewhere.

Mimi Lauter at Mendes Wood DM

(link)

In the race to excess, these currently run 1st. Not just color but adrenalized Bonnard, Redon - the positive effects of doping "oil pastel thick as frosting." Important that color, texture, perfumes, not be burdened with anything other than raw id, naiveté. Not images of the garden, these are the garden. Just arrange the bulbs, let them grow color. This is a positive review. 

Reinhard Mucha at Francis Irv

(link)

Probably one of those artists in deserving the retrospective. So we can all collectivize our memory of him. Put him on speaking terms, a common language. Is that what retrospectives do? Not interested in the past but about the fact that looks like today, no?

Omari Douglin, Lukas Quietzsch at Ramiken

(link)

Position the abstractions with cartoons, to prove they have content. That the cartoon contents has an abstract value. Painting is a patchwork quilts. A color you sew to its vessel. A sponge absorbs what's near, a painting is its circumstance. How it is positioned, hung, curated. "the canvas becomes a better receptacle." It just takes it. Abstraction are cartoons, our cartoons are abstractions. etc. 

Rachel Fäth at Francis Irv

(link)

A kind of formalism we find endearing, one that follows its own form into esoterics. Questions of "what's it for" alienation, what use could it be? Because art has no use, though we require it. This leaves an open question where meaning forms. All the little points and greebles to precipitate it.

Think Richard Rezac's alien question, meets Oscar Tuazon's protestant ethic, and Matt Paweski's erotic service of the machine, or K.r.m Mooney's "Jeweler's dilemma."

See too: Richard Rezac, Oscar Tuazon at Le Consortium & Paradise Garage, Matt Paweski, K.r.m Mooney

Hamishi Farah at Maxwell Graham / Essex Street

(link)

It's a hard press release to beat. One can only be more explicit. In gaming, "the meta" is the strategy created by players using knowledge of the inner workings of the game mechanics. For something like chess, "playing the meta" is axiomatic to the game, whereas for a role playing game, a certain suspension of disbelief is required, and "playing the meta" is frowned upon. Since Art is our collective cloud based MMORPG, it is a game requiring its players to pretend like they aren't playing the meta - like they didn't lick the curator's cheeks clean after dinner. Like their abstractions are of conceptual merit. We know art's function and follow that to its form. Broodthaers aside, artists acknowledging the meta is tongue in cheek - Krebber or contingent painting or whatever. But Art's meta was basically laid out by Bourdieu and everyone kind of just steps around this like they stepped around the rich but racist patron until recently it became more meta advantageous to call them out publicly. The meta is always up for debate. The point is, "black portraiture has been through an intense though not unprecedented revaluation in recent years" and that was white's first move. Black to move next. And since we know art's inner function can predict the form, and lo: Farah makes that obvious move, Black Painting. Farah does what he does best, the politics self represent. The exchange in chess, in art, is a foregone conclusion. It's the stupid, brazenly open transaction, of seeing the pawn offered, being taken, that makes it fun.

See too: Hamishi Farah at Fri Art

A.L. Steiner at 80WSE

(link)

Tillmans can be oppressive with his cloying sentiment, that Sontagian moribund, everything mementos, everything matters, everything porcelain, precious. Show me a Tillmans photo of people having fun and know its death. Opposite Steiner's photo suites: that no one matters - that you can discard any of these photos - replace them with any other moment of life. Ignore the politics: here there's actually people having fun. People smile, people jest. This is not the search for the perfect embalming light. It's not people in the societal bondage gear of photography or Cindy Sherman cruelty. There is no distant connoisseurship. Just what collectivizes in the fringes of your eyes at night. 

See too: Wolfgang Tillmans at Galerie Buchholz Wolfgang Tillmans at Maureen Paley, Amalia Ulman at The Gallery at El Centro

Joseph Olisaemeka at Derek Eller Gallery

(link)

An interesting tactic: painting the farm "despite having little to no knowledge of farming ecosystems."  Painting what you don't know, you can only paint the preconceived cultural idea, your own expectations. This sounds like a criticism but it's the opposite: this is plein air myth. There's a depth. Like von Wulffen, history roils up from behind. Like, history bruises the present moment. The big looming past. A past in the shadows. Haunts. Not present in the main narrative. The foreground is today bright and hard to see past. Built into the effect of how we paint today. An interest in the depth of the inkblot.

See too: Amelie von Wulffen,  forgetful surrealism

Yusuke Saito at PAGE (NYC)

(link)

Which the point, both pizza and painting must conjure desire, edible or erudite. There's some fun in that world: imagining a Rothko you can take a bite of. At base, both P formats touch on some primeval instinct, desire. The switcheroo of painting's distanced judgement with the less socially clouded appreciation for pizza makes the point a bit clearer - there is a less than high basement to our admirations. There will be no food critic telling you to enjoy worms on your pizza, but there is always an art critic who will. 

Catharine Czudej at Meredith Rosen Gallery

(link)

From last exhibition's moribund gloom to this one's concrete clowning provides a whiplash we could call slapstick. The comic whateverness. These clown jewels. But like last time eventually someone turns on the light, cleans up, eventually the parachute disappears and we're left with with walls forced to carry expensive rocks, no levity at all. No balloon, just concrete. No criticality, just painting. The sign eventually wins over its irony, there will just be jewel. We have to learn this again and again and again we never learn. 

Group Show at Laurel Gitlen

(link)

Sidner's ability to plasticize an idea. The lesson here is any idea, even a middling one, put into overdrive, excess 110%, might be something, just make sure its crystallized in glass.

Plasticizers: Camille Henrot, Camille Blatrix, Magali Reus, Benjamin Reiss, Anna Uddenberg

Quentin James McCaffrey at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery

(link)

The mystery of Vermeer is that the paintings see everything and look at nothing, the affect is a staring-through, at a point beyond the painting. A that paint only rims the glass of some void. This surely the effect of the photographic ground which is indifferent to the demands of painter/painting. Because the camera is stupid, doesn't care for subject, is uncanny. (A camera's alienation we have grown acclimated to, and it takes a painting to reproduce the effect. This is similar Cerletty's virtual, an anonymizing viewpoint.)

The point being these literalize Vermeer's void, concretely remove the subject to hammer home the point of vacuous non-subject, an everything-but. Subject is replaced with mirrors, glints of light, with air. Instead searching for it. This makes mystery.

See too: "Colonel Rublev in the museum with a candlestick, paintings mechanization of mystery", Mathew Cerletty, Gertrude Abercrombie at Karma

Aria Dean at Greene Naftali

(link)

The disquiet is a lack, everything here is removal. The crash crash minimalism is instead a computer rendering - the handsy violence of Chamberlin reproduced in silicon gum, printed. Blank assets of a Looney Tunes world. What if we removed all this, life? A gray goo situation, the jouissant world replaced with... the basest simplest desire of self reproduction. The gray goo scenario is a metaphor for art, for everything, what if our propagation is what it's all about? Highest achievement, another art exhibition. The artist gets out the goo. 

Dean making work without any of the generalized signifiers of Black art, while avowing her "ongoing pursuit of art that models the structure of Blackness." Dean's is a work that is scrubbed. This scrubbing would be a fertile ground for critical hooha, but mostly it is an affective one, in the sense that it's almost affectless, chilly. Slaughterhouse modernism, art galleries, the anti-ligature rooms of our age. "A room full of paintings that won't let you kill yourself."

See too: Aria Dean at The Renaissance Society, Melvin Edwards at Daniel Buchholz

Benjamin Echeverria at Francis Irv

(link)

Patina authenticates, proves labor, human, the subject goo we desire from painting. Painting is an adhesive that collects the air of its subject the artist. More than brushwork. It's how Guyton manufactured his celebration: all the little blips and drips and skips he was commended for tugging out - pressing print on the markers of work, authenticity! This was during the vogue of reclaimed wood cladding a world turning plastic.  The myth of artistic journey, as a symbol for it. "If I give you my denim. Will you simulate distress"?

See too: Alvin Baltrop at Hannah Hoffman, Frank Walter at David Zwirner, Purvis Young at James Fuentes

Vittorio Brodmann at PAGE (NYC)

(link)

The teenage sock, the teenage notebook - sites of primordial soup of painting congealing life, sentience, evolution doesn't always lead to advancement, occasionally a butthole develops on a forehead, leaves a whole family tree in ruin - these are the expenses of transformation, a horribly burned beast, a whole society left with questions of euthanizing the entire series, of paintings, but we don't do that anymore, we let them live, you never know when the butthead will teach you something.

Seth Price at Petzel

(link)

The real technology here is that Price found a way to avoid pinning his artist-butterfly subjectivity by letting some robots in. An android Price built to avoid fully naming, exposing, the artistic myth, Seth Price, fully. We trust gesture and painting as the concretized mind of the artist - and this techno means allowed Price what he's always been after, the squid's escape. Q, what we're left holding. A, disappearance duh. His long term subject and maybe Price's longterm point is proving that this is actually an axiom of art, left clutching ink resembling but not quite actualizing a human.

Anna Uddenberg at Meredith Rosen Gallery

(link)

Cronenberg baby furniture? American BDSM Airlines x BabyBjörn? You can make distinct things look like other things because the microtization of affect becomes an all encompassing sign system. Think of the distinction between "tactical" t-shirt, "sport" t-shirt, "yoga" t-shirt. The detailing designates the meaning - both real and fake at the same time. Meaning emerges like gender identity. My baby is a tactical baby. Mine is liberal. A performance without origin. So of course the high end sex toys begins to look like baby toys - they are catering to the tastes of the same buyer - who assembles a closet of identity, no different from meaning. These affective layers are what AI is so good at spinning. Certain AI generators ban the  word "Cronenberg." His is too powerful. You start to see things that were always there. The "suggestification" of art. 

Theory of the couch.

The reason we've gotten into upholstery, into couches, chairs and gotten into sleeping bags, is that they infer us. They contain the ghost of the human they were made for. Every chair is a bodily innuendo. And the pervert knows what the decorous don't.

Sean Lander at Petzel

(link)

Look how the painter hath degraded himself. The banal subject, of the artist groveling to dirty populism. Warhol painted soup, but he would never have painted these. This is below commodities, this is midwestern, this is flyover content. The joke surely. 

"If Landers plays obsessively on the constant alternation between folie de grandeur and writhing in the gutter, he’s always playing to his audience, pandering a bit, begging for love even as he demonstrates—insists, well-nigh demands—that he’s a no-good loser fuck-head." - Rimanelli, Artforum

But it's a play. The dogs aren't even well painted. From afar sure, but up close the whole thing loses luster. If you're going to make the joke, commit to the joke. Eat the whole thing.

Mark van Yetter at Bridget Donahue

(link)

Limbo. The doubling erects a structure which to suspend it. Hangs its image over some chasm. Threshold space. Can't quite be consumed wholesale. Have that non-time about them, that Goodnight Moon / de Chirico quasi-space.  Not quite painting, nor drawing; not quite comic books nor scene painting nor ideation board but more narrative in the way of IKEA instructions for building a BILLY bookshelf dream.