Olaf Breuning at Metro Pictures

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The big dumb. A more cartoon sculpture. Ironic paleo-totemism. With a smile. Breuning's interest in our connection to laughable things. The cruder it is, the more archaic it looks, the more permanent we perceive it. Interminably stupid rocks last an unfortunate forever. So paintings like pictograms, petroglyphs. Give a rock some doe eyes.

"As the world feels closer and closer to destabilization, isolationism, far-right tolerance, moves closer towards its end, we find solace looking towards the primitive technologies we might find as our future, and the deities we will worship in the trees we once had."

"we find some comfort in dirt smeared not because of its primeval "truth" but because it seems like it can't obsolesce, it can't be superseded, blown away as dust, which we mistake for being eternal."

See too: Olaf Breuning at Metro Pictures, Solange Pessoa at Mendes Wood DM, Aaron Angell at Koppe Astner

Olaf Breuning at Metro Pictures

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Clownic terror is their emotional indifference to our own, irony as slapstick, forcing a replacement of our feelings with manic versions, to feel better. Happy or sad, the clown face draws its emotion as large as possible, overpowering the nuanced plane of facial expression, overshadowing our own, powerless and impotent. Breuning's horror vacuii of expressionist ebullience, in video or images, leaves no space, everything feeling filled with manic awful glee. Even an expression of solidarity, "It is hard sometimes," writ in colorful sponge overly cheerful, is covered in the image of a woman hefting the weight of the world with a playfully stupid incompetence, a weight we can't carry, and mocking us for it. Breuning a villain swaddled in fun that is no fun at all.