Michael Ho at High Art

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The painter's goosebumps, the matte scumbled frission - Oliver Osborne, Nolan Simon, Caleb Considine, Jennifer J. Lee - rough textures through gentle painting - is easy to symptomatize: we desire a materiality to show though vulnerable image, to watermark them with that rarity, the real.

See too: (Matte Representation)

Berenice Olmedo at Fitzpatrick Gallery

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"Every era gets the art it deserves." So then, artists were the indicator species, or canary to coal mine. Like a fever to an ailing body, art was a symptom "deserved." And so we looked to artists like idiot-savant diagnosticians. We gave them our signs, our medical equipment, pictures of our sickness so they would perform the rituals to make meaning in the churches. We didn't believe they could heal us, but we believed in a hidden knowledge in the nonsense.

Autumn Ramsey at Crèvecoeur

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You can't write an ode to a rose, you can't praise a flower already so decorative. The rose was manufactured, it's image doesn't exist in nature - it was cultivated by science, gardeners, botanists, whose Icarus-like purpose was to strike at god, the consumer, with something more red, more voluptuous, more synthetically emblematic of verbose Beauty. The rose is a sick and twisted beast, tattoo'd into a vacuous cliche. And it is this excess artificiality that Ramsey's paintings do well, acknowledging their plastic grandeur - it is synthetic, a drug, a worldview hybridized from research chems, paint and brush. The decorative layered on the cliche. This is your grandma commenting on how much she loves your teenage wall's prismatic dancing bear. Then later it's the reverse, finding yourself staring up at your grandma's wood paneled wall, finding yourself liking her painting of a duck, its okay to like a painting of a duck, it just doesn't feel right.

Wade Guyton at Galerie Chantal Crousel

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Whatever happened to Guyton\Walker? That cute duo bring relinking Genzken to a Raushenberg root, and then turned it to comedy, printed it on everything. This was right before the algorithm, before KAYA, right before Walmart was caught selling a mug emblazoned with adults wearing diapers. Both Walmart and G\W were a parody of the same thing, mass appeal and the need to fill any and all space by placing everything onto everything else, both of the same quality. It seems prescient now, as the bargain bin of content rises to surface of every display possible. That these are starting to look like Gerhard Richter's priciest paintings seems to follow from the rest. You can put anything on a mug. Again, production is the product. 

Michaela Eichwald at Marian Goodman

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But Eichwald finds the edge, the moment before a Frankenthaler turns into a dog's sick. 

The neanderthal nappie merchants - Joe Bradley, Josh Smith, et al - attempted proving beyond doubt: paint just always looks good. But Eichwald makes one really sit in its question. 

Nicolas Ceccaldi at Édouard Montassut

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Fan art quickly leads to the extremes of content. At one end you have the pure libidinal energy of slash fiction / rule34 / sonichu into the deepest depravity of desire. At the other end you have the desire to elevate, make "cool" and consumable and you see Shepard Fairey storm troopers and pencil drawings of Darth Vader measured in hours of work. While the latter only serves as offering to valorize its master the IP - the pervert instead steals the content and moves it into their own playpen. For instance Puppies Puppies unauthorized public-domaining of the today's modern epics (Spongebob, LoTR) - treating them as oral traditions that can be used for our own purposes, fuck The Mouse, and create our own worlds, rather than eternally paint pictures of our tourism in other's properties. This not being the druids we're looking for. 

Martine Bedin at Crèvecoeur

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Art is a ludicrous object, a Rube Goldberg device for some strange cultural malignancy. But art's basic forms mask the inanity. Painting is a format that seems to tautologically explain itself, it's a painting, it's meant for walls. In this way artwork falsely naturalizes. Bedin's objects evolve structures that prevent naturalization, like peacock tails they are partly too stupid for this world, but somehow biologically necessary. Design which refuses to be necessary, importantly. 

Alain Guiraudie at Crèvecoeur & Timothy Kelly at Can

(Can, Crèvecoeur)

A joke about photography being the Hoover of the world, indiscriminately sucking.

Camille Soualem at Exo Exo

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George W. Bush's leaked Guccifer paintings were laughably earnest in the ex-pres's personal struggle with representation - they were self-conscious, bad, and, literally, nakedly vulnerable. The ineptitude allowed obvious metaphors that any regular publicist would shine out. A war criminal's self-portraits with all the symbolism of teenage art class. And this was the president's teenage years. Literally looking in the mirror, at toes, again, naked. Later, when Bush realized he could append thick abstraction to cover for lack of talent the paintings became middling, average, collegiate. An impasto to cover the cracks, a style to camouflage. But the bad was when it was good. Appropriate here. 

Maryam Hoseini at High Art

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People bent to composition. A stress positions of beauty. Art's been holding bodies to uncomfortable tasks for forever. Models etoliated on diet coke and fashionable ambitions. Hieronymus Bosch. The garden of hell is scary not because we believe it exists, but because someone imagined it. And really this is painting that demands it, which is just us. Picasso beats his models to a pulp and Jordan Wolfson Real Violence. A trumpet out the ass, regaling. Wine or boiling oil, what difference. Think the Matrix-line virtual plane of painting's imaginative space, where anything can be conjured, and somehow Hellraiser exists, is a franchise. 

See too:Tala Madani, Violence Against Faces

Gabriel Orozco at Galerie Chantal Crousel

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Orozco used to make sculpture. Now Orozco sells tourist art, but as the tourist. Souvenirs not of your travels but his, buying his peripatetic romance. We purchase romance. - this is what artists sell, on Japanese paper. That they are almost literally inkblots is perfect. Because this romance is all you can project into it, interpret it. A diary of plants, us once again reading tea leaves left of porcelain walls, shit. 

The whole premise of "process-based abstraction"'s creating souvenirs of experience is premised on some vestigial trait of conceptual that may never have existed. Like, does On Kawara's "January 22nd 1988" on canvas actually mean anything outside a finger pointing toward it. Does an artist in the forest placing native plants on a canvas actually contain its sound? What information is stored? 

While this was the central conundrum to conceptual art since its inception, the rupture and distance between sign and object (always at risk that its sign didn't actually contain its object) it has since been taken as granted, as a granting agency for value added. .... Jason Rhoades built a career of mocking this value-added system, performing it under absurdly comical conditions, to create his referentially seminal signature: PeaRoeFoam, a mess of so much reference and history and jest that it self imploded. 

souvenirs of experience: Sam Falls at 303 Gallery, their valorization: James Hoff at VI, VII

Tea leaves from the bowels: Yuji Agematsu at Lulu

and of course, inkblots.

Sophie Reinhold at Fitzpatrick Gallery

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"Aporia" industrializes the poetic - it is the rupture in understanding, the internal disjunction, a preventative against relieving meaning its burden. You read a sentence, understand it and move on. But the poetic aporia of a poem's line provides no conclusion. This is the life support of art, meaning eternally suspended from conclusive death. Ever further "meaning," ever longer wall texts. But as we've gotten better at corralling interpretations, butterfly pinning beauty to theory - the artist must gather from further ends in the fields of elusivity. Eventually the canyon becomes large enough and field once again becomes meaningless and we get to enjoy flowers again. Sink into the bubble's bath.

"...the only thing left to do is to produce greater and greater gulfs of meaning": Carissa Rodriguez at Wattis, Adriana Lara at Algus Greenspon, Henning Bohl at What Pipeline

Valerie Keane at High Art

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We haven't had a Valerie Keane solo since 2016 when formal adventure seemed fun and the garbage was reassembling as totem, content, rococco. (see too: Chadwick Rantanen at STANDARD (OSLO)) In the years since our formalism as gotten less cyber-baroque and more goopy materialist, the photogenic mud wresting which makes Keane's seem chaste. Thing looks different against different backgrounds. And against the ever shifting micro-genres of the last ten years not changing appears new.

Chadwick Rantanen at STANDARD (OSLO)

Sergio Sarri at Fitzpatrick Gallery

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so thoroughly of and beyond our moment. Information turned kaleidoscopic mirage, tortured on the rack of art. Things being their surfaces. A car commercial all at once.

Sean Patrick Watters at Galerie Praz-Delavallade

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We're in a strange moment where art and fashion photography are, at least temporarily in alignment, attempting the same ends, a representation of soul. This is particularly hard for anyone ambivalent to commercial desire as well as anyone distrustful of photography to actually display anything like an inner. There is a mysticism at root to both in a belief that the image is inherently capable. It is a fair acknowledgement to say the commercial world wields the great cultural club here, since it controls the beacon we all see through. At the same time we have Heji Shin big inkblots of Kanye West - and we know these say nothing about him. Photography is perhaps really only capable of editing its own mirage?

Louise Sartor at Crèvecoeur

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It used to be that tapestries were the most valuable, we prized labor which each stitch proved, then genius was invented and we prized painting as its creative embodiment, value. Now painting fears replacement, desperately nails its aura to the wall. We spent 30 years whinging in big journals that painting was dead, or dying (or unnaturally resurrected braindead seeking brains, electrified by market) but what if what kills painting isn't the turgid laments of the cranially shined, but simply that it looks too much like the image in the age of its hyper-inflation, they start to look cheap. Defenses agains it: object and aura, but also, skill? Stay tuned.

Zhiliang Zhao at Lulu & Hélène Fauquet at Édouard Montassut

(Zhao, Fauquet)

Two strategies in our current glass. One manifests an excess materiality as defense - declarative flag in mud. The other exacerbates glass. That we look through so much glass today has refracted art to implicitly shift around this invisible structure framing our experience: this why we see so much mud today, so many cartoons for instagram, so much iconographic surrealism with the depth of iPad. The world is viewed predominantly through these lenses, through lens, glass, 4k screen. Seeing Jasper Johns in person like viewing a woolly mammoth at the history center. "Oh they have art on computers now." We bend around and through it. We've been saying this for a while are you bored yet?

See too: Tony Conrad's Glass, Materialphilia, Federico Herrero at Lulu, Rose Marcus at Night Gallery, Hélène Fauquet at Edouard Montassut 

Emma McIntyre at Air de Paris

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Amazing how far we've come. 10 years ago Josh Smith was ironically fucking himself on canvas, Joe Bradley's neanderthal nappies were thought the bedrock of low, stoopid fun. Kerstin Brätsch's fake import/export DAS INSTITÜT. But the ironizing of the sign only serves the delivery of what we really wanted: big juice, canvas, double gulp size. Irony allowed for cake and its excuse too: this was sugar free painting, a critique or whatever. But "the sign will always triumph through the screen of an ironic signifier." And eventually someone realized they didn't need a delivery vehicle for cake. And so now today here have it, full blown painting Tang.

Shabahang Tayyari at Balice Hertling

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These are nice (Iranian patterning meets cybernetic Guy Fieri Art Deco?) though wishes for the embedded content to be less burned images and more left to surface, but surely that just another means in a long tradition in finding representation for forbidden figuration?

See too: Sarah Morris at Berggruen

Autumn Ramsey at Crèvecoeur

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This would be the, at least, 4th cat butthole - this one with lips of thighs to attend a sort of mollusk rear. (There's also been at least one, albeit less luxurious, dog butt.) Trying to describe a hole, an absence, but a thing rife with image: the son of god appears in a dog. (Google "dog butt Jesus.") The point being, the rear of a cat is an icon for the mirage factory of Ramsey - the butt is the nexus where the world goes abstract, the fur whorls, the thing, like a Klein bottle, turns in on itself, disappears. Self empties. Self decorates its hole hallucination. Like all the roses. 

See too: Martín Soto Climent at Proyectos Monclova