Yui Yaegashi at Gallery of The Porto Arts Club

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These too are the pleasure of a bar of soap but carved with an x-acto blade, more surgery than nostalgia. More ikea than film. There's a zen in watching organization, seeing construction. You follow the traces of the rake in the sand garden, allow the mind a meander. The painting equivalent of inventing new forms of that.


see too:  There's value in expunging. Calm, an app that "monetized doing nothing" recently valued at 2 billion dollars. Or Marie Kondo selling products to help you get rid of yours. But more, there's value in making something noble, moral. Vices turned into connoisseurship: it's not alcoholism it's an appreciation for wine, now "natural" wines. And these sell temperance, withholding, from the big jouissance of painting. There's an analogy to certain kinks. Where painting out provides the pleasure. 

The efficiency and craft of them promises if not to organize your home to organize your thoughts... Like the now international Muji, or ikea before it, objects which through their own clever construction promise you their better efficiency. An object that promises to lend you its perfection.

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?

Marte Eknæs at A MAIOR

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Safety products not only abating hazard but highlight its possibility. A potentialized air of drama that we'd love to accumulate on art's stage: at any moment calamity, at any moment circumstance. There is said to be "a situation." Sort of like an "experience." Even this weak force in the real Painting wishes it could hold such potential. Some previously invisible thing be felt.  The "layers of infrastructure that determine experience."

see too: Marte Eknæs, Sean Raspet at Room East

Trevor Shimizu at Kunsthalle Lissabon

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, which the inept can be lovable or painful, the bumbling either funny or eye-rolling, and Shimizu's an extended question of which.

Caroline Mesquita at Kunsthalle Lissabon

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have oft nightmares of the things that run underneath the earth. Wasn't that a major plot point of  Ghostbusters? Nightmares manifested as physical slime, the collective bad vibes of a city?  gives image to what we all feel as the undercurrents of sociality, culture, we say the city was "electric" but when the mood goes sour feels like beneath the faces of everyone pumps black bile. 20th century surrealism seemed too preoccupied with the mythos of artistic genius, and everyone's paintings explored personal psyche which led to Hollywood giving more spectacular manifestations of cultural rather personal psyche. Isn't there a movie where Tom Hanks is almost drown in his suburban basement by a pipe pumping it full of shit? Or is this another nightmare. Artists have a whole history digging holes - outdoors, in studio, in gallery, in life - but one would like for a genealogy of pipes. Nightmare pipes, a genre.


see too: Caroline Mesquita at T293, Nicolas Deshayes at Modern Art, “May the Bridges I Burn Light the Way” at STANDARD (OSLO)

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.

Katja Novitskova at Kunsthalle Lissabon

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And so a Post_genzken assemblies of latent forms, picked from the rubble of culture's meaning. Juxtapositions of surreal cultures, perma-wet newts draped over soft curves, lures, draw out the erotic bulbous content of two ergonomics, maternal and futuristic, formal erotics as design. Sex sells but make it latent for babies, and a generation later, adults questioning their attraction to PVC and silicone. Like reefs' sexual economics, generations of attraction breed the most sensual and beautiful creatures which design now too playing libidinal forms, like car interior's handles looking evermore like dildos, the attention here toward the fetishistic bits of a culture's attraction. A bassinet that looks undistinguishable from a sex toy, and so what does this say about culture.


From a long thread continued: Nancy Lupo at Wallspace, Goshka Macuga at Rüdiger Schöttle, Anicka Yi at Cleveland Museum of Art, Transformer Station, Olga Balema at Croy Nielsen, David Lieske at MUMOK, "Flat Neighbors" at Rachel Uffner