Precious Okoyomon at Mendes Wood DM

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The cultural weaponization of neoteny, cuteness, kawaii on innocent populations of children should be studied. It could be thought a capitalist mass psychologic operation were it not oft excused as a natural selection, evolution. i.e. Children cute to their parents/societies are at an advantage. Dolls cute to children incite demand, create growth. Their eyes grow ever larger like Disney rodents, their butts ever more Venusian, a natural selection of commodities. But the cartoon bear is a genetically modified organism. More like your dog. Bent by artists as caricatures of your desire. And our culture's animated fauna seem purpose built. Pikachu, Care Bears, Labubu et al. are the new gargoyles, arranged on our churches to steer children toward its higher power, sugary cereals, cartoon commercials, gacha casinos. Gargoyles were the stick of hell, hyper cuddly bears the desirous carrot to capital. Grimm's fairy tales moralism became too grim, but a pleading-eyes GMO mass manipulation, equally moralistic, we condone. This is what Paul McCarthy's pillaging those Disney Princesses seemed after, an inverse subliminal moralization, all Grimm mythos on our plastic babies. Same here.

see too: We identify with cuteness, with the interminable wet-eyed critters of Disney, Pokemon, whatever latest commodified and neotenic rodent. Cuteness' pressure causing Pugs' eyes to bulge and esophagus to choke. (The stunted bone structure of Pikachu leaves him in constant pain.) And Landers' plaid animals, sad clowns, and now a pinocchio "plankboy" are the means of a lesser sort of identification. Landers' characters are not focus-group perfected. 

Cuteness is a gargoyle, the policing gremlins of Gothic architecture dispersed into media, into Pikachu, politically kneading your desire into acceptable dough. Cuteness creates artificial identification, forces sysmpathy, care, for an object its church. You become sympathetic to their cause, the militarized demons of the holy police state, Pikachu. 

"Konrad Lorenz argued in 1949 that [cuteness] triggered nurturing responses in adults and that this was an evolutionary adaptation which helped ensure that adults cared for their children, ultimately securing the survival of the species. Some later scientific studies have provided further evidence for Lorenz's theory."

...and Rantanen has made them to overwork themselves, speed demise, intentionally crafting kawaii critters to abuse their labor-force in the circuits of his machinery. The gestures seem less absurd than frustrated, Rantanen's exacerbation of late-stage-capital's more aggressively abject objects.

Babies are, by definition, pathetic

Emma Reyes at Crèvecoeur

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The point is, give your inkblot a shape. Let the shape sweat out something to be seen. Not to interminably serialize a single spilled question mark. There is something to be seen here. In the sweating flesh of a tomato jacuzzi. We don't know what it is but it is to be seen.

See too: inkblot

Dean Sameshima at Good or Trash

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"Anonymous" spinning a literary riff on the signifier/signified. The homosexual is undepicted, they are of course anonymous. The label points to but not at any particular one. But the anonymous label moves us away from the description and toward its potential depicted as a question already presupposed. Who is the homosexual? What happened on Kawara's date? Who is CAWD? This rupture in the signifier/-fied is the imaginative potential. This is the poetic, the nostalgia. A promised object in losing, already lost. The double stamp on the homosexual as "anonymous" dooms them - you will not receive them back, they are lost to time.

Mona Filleul at Air de Paris

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During painting's 2020 surrealist phase there was a subgenre of turbo David Salle. Painting as "cultural flypaper" collecting reference stuck to its support, a miasma of cartoons/image/internet/whatever. The idea isn't bad. Painting, after all, is a tray to collect image/culture. The painter gives it a little swirl and voila, art. But bathrooms walls collect better. Graffiti sediments the unconscious at night. The irruption on the walls of a bedroom is seminal. Just stuff, often more interesting than art.

See too: Subgenres of surrealism, "the kids grown on cartoons have arrived and their childhoods have coincidentally, absurdly, become the accurate depictions of the way the world has begun to feel"

David Douard at Galerie Chantal Crousel

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in comparison to the raw sewage spilling onto gallery floors today ( see: aspirated trash ), this seems from a moment ago, when we would arabesque our garbage, assemblage a baroque. Our Ornaments of trash. Douard's look like Matisse at this point. Maybe the water we swim is so full of waste that's its just water at this point. Simply the material we sculpt with now. Valerie Keane, Robert Bittenbender, but really it's all Genzken's fault. 

See too: Valerie Keane

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?