Manuel Solano at Peres Projects

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Solano's might seem cloying because its sleeves are so obvious with themes and questions. A painter who can't see their paintings, like dutch artists dying before their fame, a childhood lost through the sieve of VHS decay. Is memory the same thing as seeing? Does the memory exist better the mind of the painter than the paint, than the VHS? Does the record recall better than what we contain? Is the painting always a failed handshake? Our paintings ostensibly live on past us, past our eyes. These only catalyze the already running processes of time. Like painting beyond your death.

Not sure our paintings need to be so cultivatedly disinterested, nor esoteric in questions. These are fine illustrations of the problem.

Yaerim Ryu at Peres Projects

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Advertising so robbed the corpus of idealization from the hands of artists that now artistic representation is doomed to forever paint us as lumbering buffoons. As canon fodder, to painting's demands. "A state of painting that has sunk so far into endless permutable bent-figuration - that someone actually tending to the body feels like free healthcare." A desire for the tender of wounds. 

See too: Karen Fan, Caroline Zhang at Gern en Regalia, Erwin Wurm at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, “Automatic Door” at Park View / Paul Soto

Donna Huanca Obsidian Mirror Peres Projects

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10 years ago we were all in an anxious tizzy about painting - my god the hand wringing. Only to now have all that skepticism dissipate and we believe in its showroom, with spirit, animism, whatever addendum/dance in front of it? What happened? This is steroidal. A possibility that nothing changed. Maybe all we ever wanted, invented, was new excuses for modernism. New excuses for a new old painting. 

Austin Lee at Peres Projects

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Part of the fun of bad painting is learning to love it. Same reason why some people like pictures of gore: to have an authority over the repulse. An enjoyment to finding the next level of trash, a little further to the new bedrock of stupidity. This is enjoyable. Just when you think painting can't get any worse, it gets a little worse. Vertigo in bad taste. Now here we have representations of bad taste. The difference between painting badly and making paintings of bad things. It would seem to absolve the painter, who blames the world for his representation, as if to say, "I am merely the recorder." "Look how well I have painted the dead clown" In the evolution of the dreadfulness in art, is the next step bad paintings that tries to pass themselves off as proficient? Truly awful, yes.

See too: Aaron Curry at Michael Werner

Richard Kennedy at Peres Projects

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"I’m Tired of Being Your Side Bitch:Black Opera As Architecture"

Blair Thurman at Peres Projects

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Big dumb is an aesthetic too, one the world increasingly relies on for its power, like all those Franz West sculptures set in financial building courtyards, a dumbness used to soften the sharp rectilinearity of power. Big dumb feigns a friendliness that can't speak. A jocularity that hides, obliterating qualities. Like bricks of ham, they are inarguable, simply there. It's like turning painting into a fight with large oversized Wiffle bats. To hide violence in something plastic. For some reason we're attracted to it.

Dean Sameshima at Peres Projects

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It's like, the closer the reproduction of its subject the harder gleaning meaning from the painter expressing it. We look for warbles, imperfections in the representation, as some sort of clue, some sort of drip as content declaring its expression. "...appear to be silkscreened when they were in fact hand-painted." But the painters lack of "expression" leaves the information all the hamfistedly plainer. "Look" declares the painter. "But surely something else, too!" responds the viewer. And we become anthropologists to a receipt, what we've recieved, deciphering for the overflow of content we expect must be there. Like On Kawara, the reaching attempt for the sign to fully contain what it denotes and the distance from it actually, a single day or a free coffee, is the pathos of its content. Open your own wallet and see the days. This distance, this nostalgia, is the loss, the pathos deployed.



See too: On Kawara at the Guggenheim

Dan Attoe at Peres Projects

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Do you ever wonder if turns toward despondency in painting are mere symptoms of the loss of modernist grandeur, of the castration complex sort, of fathers having handing down a impotent device for communing. Seed no longer fertile as the sadness painters endure. That Verne Dawson expectancy, a composition where something central and monumental has been lost. A lot of Attoe's paintings deal with this central space removed, or mountainous.



See too: Thomas Eggerer at Friedrich Petzel

Dorothy Iannone at Peres Projects

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It’s hard not to think of these in terms of what was to come later, this early work stripped of the later iconic cartoon sex of which the artworld’s allergy continually presented itself, that these early works are more pleasing, tasteful, and thus contemporary than the radically “uncomfortable” figures dressed in an unironic over-presence that still don’t get much play today.

See too : Judith Bernstein at Studio Voltaire.