Paola Pivi at Dallas Contemporary

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"These gestures are about freedom." A Childlike freedom attaining adult power, a cartoon friendliness abstracting its happy bludgeon of reality. The world to putty to whatever libidinal desire or dreams, placing Zebras dying in the Arctic. It seemed fun. An absurdism that borders on the psychotic, like Burden's childlike megalomania masquerading as glee, fun hides its stupid destruction of reality in which, above all, our dreams must be manifest.


See too: Paola Pivi at Emmanuel Perrotin, Chris Burden Metropolis II at LACMA, Henning Bohl at What Pipeline, Sadie Benning at Mary Boone & Callicoon Fine Arts

Paola Pivi at Emmanuel Perrotin

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Difficult discerning difference between Pivi's surrealist juxtapositions and Darren Bader's, - horses and towers vs Borscht and omlettes - Pivi's more dramatic, climatically absurd, and the drama infers a "point" (i.e. comfort of "meaning"), a melodrama resolution that Bader's flat-footed bumbling never pretenses, or pretends, because we know its not true, both ultimately about taunting the eternal darkness oncoming.


See too: Darren Bader at Kölnischer Kunstverein, Darren Bader at Andrew Kreps