David Douard at Serralves

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The trash pile of culture looks different every 20 years. Certain shapes just didn't exist 30 yers ago. Metal logos metastasized and "Every 10 years the art's assemblage reinvents itself as the dumpsters picked through are modernized to the current castoffs and appear new, the waste that evolves along culture until finally an artist is able to rummage up enough LEDs, acrylic panels and Arte Povera catalogs to accumulate the update to our Rauschenberg cardboard clogging the pipes of our forward progress. At least sticks are still in vogue as symbols of the foraging, our original human toil, production."

This "looks like you blew up a shopping mall, like its reassembly after catastrophe, like hangers categorizing airline wreckage. Trying to make sense in debris. Us, a cargo cult. Us, a primitive culture, [these are the] aurochs on our white cave walls. With the debris of culture. Our Mystic auto-anthropology."

"art treats culture as a system of artifacts to be interrogated by its own white light certification process, a factory for meaning production." 

Art becomes cultural waste, the gallery swallows, and you the viewer digest its tract. and "We eat its excitement."

Eventually the malls will look again like this, maybe they already do. 

A Maior at Kunsthalle Freeport, Porto

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Our best guess, that Yu Yuan is the mother/"mistress"/owner or maybe just matriarch(?) of A Maior, the Portugal based general store* with an ostensible curatorial program, (and curating the Kunsthalle Freeport, Porto.) We're probably wrong, and probably the point is a bit of confusion, which is occasionally fun. Whoever she is she seems important. The world has championed less with more. At least some of our "mistresses" deserve billboards. It's fun to burn space to our flowers.

*Open Mondays to Saturdays, from 9:30 to 19:00. Sundays and Holidays, from 10:00 to 19:00. Selling mostly everything for your home, except food.

See too: Marte Eknæs at A MAIOR

R. H. Quaytman at Serralves

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Quaytman is forebear to today's painting puzzification. Like any good mystery, it's rife with clues. Painting becomes signs and signals, turn painting into information, the little motifs become points of reference, repetitions to build resonance. A resonance that feels like meaning. They are endlessly elsewhere. We are told "every detail... is subject to careful control." Careful control presuming purpose for such, but surely there can be anality without purpose. Or, anality itself is the purpose. The careful control of avoiding anything so specific as to be finally graspable, a very very finely tuned house of mirrors. "a novel without conclusion." Already in 2014, Quaytman asking "What are they adding up to—or, to put it bluntly, what is the “book” about?" The question becomes that of all painters, painting, how long can Quaytman keep the mystery without end interesting. How long can one delay? How to resist saying anything while still appear to be speaking. Enough mirrors and the ventriloquist need not speak at all?

Nick Mauss at Serralves

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The decorous and the amenable, the good object acquiescing to the hand presenting it. A "dramaturgical dimension, in which display and design were paramount, is now given over to the visitor as spectator" a theater, you actor. "gendered divisions between fine or applied arts" A decored room is psychological, decoration implores you, is affect, we should pay attention to it, its nicety. The accommodating object, through docility, still manipulates, passive aggressive architectural.

Gerry Bibby, Henrik Olesen at Sismógrafo

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The semiotic distress of Bibby is possibly a place to hide the body lint of Olesen. Puns, in material and language, open up space for innuendo, for the filthy human Olesen has, for a while now, been hiding in crevasses. A crosswalk becomes a Halley abstraction becomes our semiotic Jail, both the crosswalk and painting-referent limit what had once been free space. Insect is misheard as incest and we all call you out for it because that is a freudian slip and you are mentally sick.


see too: Henrik Olesen at Reena Spaulings

Rasmus Røhling at Sismografo

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There's got to be space for boring work too, and if you've got 35 minutes to kill with some maddeningly slow and turgid exhaust you could do worse than sit with Røhling's videos, just know there's no "payoff" at the end, the continually distending thought, adhered with pauses, erms, and ums, layout a mess that like the press release are kin a studio visit with an artist's palsied logorrhea more than any "finished work." This is itself a point in the PR - "artwork is the absence of an artist" and so an ever extending never coallescing complication of an impossible mess of clotting relevance keeps the artist uncomfortably mouth-breathingly close. Autoenucleation, the poetic medical term for a person who, generally mentally unstable, personally removes their own eyes, written in acrostic and adorning a t-shirt, is a nice tagline for the exhibition, because you'll want to, but spooning out your orbitals won't help, (nor smashing the inspid mirror art), because Røhling's t-shirt evidences him as a groupie in the apoclyptic cult of an anti-retinal art, having already removed their eyes for a torturous iconoclasm-against-iconoclasm that finds metaphor in the mental penetration-against-will of overblown violence xenomorph facehuggers, the thinker.