Pentti Monkkonen at High Art

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The package as product, medium masseuse, the vessel which projects its internal object, which here isn't anything, instead the subject of art, the artist.

There's been a lot of liquor art of recent. Box and buildings too. and of course the eternal art and smoking.



Gina Folly at Ermes-Ermes
Pentti Monkkonen at Truth and Consequences
Pentti Monkkonen at High Art
"Paris De Noche” at Night Gallery
Pentti Monkkonen at Jonathan Viner

Pentti Monkkonen at Truth and Consequences

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"Blanks" is a production term for a material partially formed that has yet to receive whatever finalizing process will finish it, painting, milling, etc. The blank receives all type of process and treatments. The work formed work yet unfinished. They then recieve the processes of production, for Monkkonen the individual sign systems at play, the quasi-readymades applied the blank of painting. Monkkonen who has obviously been playing with painting as product for some time. The bug splatter, like the expressionist's before it, becomes the interpretable tea-leaves of the painting, the same as the cell-phone roach and patterning: signifiers that perform the interpretable content of "Monkkonen." Again treating painting like a blank, a material for production, vessels.


See too: Pentti Monkkonen at High Art, Pentti Monkkonen at Jonathan Viner

Pentti Monkkonen at Jonathan Viner

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Monkkonen's quotational action-figure use of product forms, graffitoed delivery vans as allegories of painting, a more precisely modern take on Vermeer's, and then the walled faces dimensionality exaggerating their form, containers of subject's latent toy childhood, but here finally now Monkkonen taking the step to make totally flat bland branded paintings, actually producing, and no longer mocking, product. And adding a merry song so we can feel the irony of another once happy artist succumbed to the needs of the market, making flat, blank fungible artwork, like enacting a Vaerslev like production line on your own brand. We could have chalked this one up quietly to a polite cash-out of symbo-cred, but then CAD posts its embarrassment sedimenting as unrescindable history, ouch.

Pentti Monkkonen at High Art, Fredrik Vaerslev at Centre d’Art Contemporain Passerelle, Zak Kitnick at Clearing, "Paris de Noche" at Night Gallery

“Paris De Noche” at Night Gallery

Andrei Koschmieder, Pentti Monkkonen, Amy Yao

(“Paris De Noche” at Night Gallery)

In a sense you don’t want to fault these three for making such perfect lozenges of product/commodities, because 1; they all really look great, and 2; to do so, would require faulting every painting ever made for its perfect commodic form: painting's content valuable for the support on which it rests, the sexy container. Similar to Seth Price for whom the packaging was the product and Dispersion as content, the three here take to crafting the package itself, in re-making the support as a form: ladders as frames, trucks as canvas, and corrugated metal as painting; each a product inseparable from its package whose functional content remain to be seen.

See too Pentti Monkkonen at High Art , Andrei Koschmieder at Real Fine Arts

Will Benedict at Bergen Kunsthall

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The new method of artistic identity production, vacant-token-products for the gallery leaving the unsaleable cultural-capital building for the museums. Benedict has always been, like Kanye, a wonderful producer woefully lacking in “content.” Instead the arrangements are based on the formal material massaged in the medium of the network, buoys in the flow. Though Yeezus was great.

And Benedict's turn towards video production gives the most interesting results, yet the temptation to connect Benedict’s passé part-outs to the subliminal-abjection of the anti-adverts - both creating a fragmented disgust - would miss how sick-sweet repulsiveness of Fried Chicken and KFC commercials is premised on their physiological allure set against a much deeper horror. Benedict’s are closer to the phenomenon of trypophobia, a socially spread internet “fear,” presenting a study of whether it actually premised off a biological response or a form of social inclusion

See too: Will Benedict at Balice Hertling 

Pentti Monkkonen at High Art



Monkkonen's box-trucks literalize the metaphor: painting as commodity vessels in transit. What were rectangular become parallel grams sent for accelerating markets. The vessels are moving fast, the trucks skull cab and silver toothed grill portend their too-fast-too-young market crash. The flow of brand. Graffiti, produce, logos, brushstrokes, artistic identities all competing for recognition.  Like many interested in the cheap plastic promise of fantastical playthings, it is found perfectly in the toy-form’s commodic pleasure whose projectable fantasy's complete dissolve of use-value mirrors art’s ostensible own. That like childhood figures of action, producing their jism all over town to heroic ends, painting an identity placed over a muscular blank, the vessel, creating a subject.


 See too: S.O.A.P.Y III at What Pipeline ; Mathis Altmann at Freedman Fitzpatrick