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?

R.H. Quaytman at Museum Sztuki

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Here's a bit of symptom diagnosis. When Quaytman broke out onto the screen, it was concurrent not only with CAD's rise but concurrent with the rise of images everywhere, foodporn or just porn, and our giddiness for this new instant image. This hi-def instantaneity was itself pleasing, interesting. This new retinal access and Apple was designing Retina Displays for. We were seeing everything for the first time coated in glass. Reviewing the iPhone 4 in 2010, Joshua Topolsky commented:

"to our eyes, there has never been a more detailed, clear, or viewable screen on any mobile device. Not only are the colors and blacks deep and rich, but you simply cannot see pixels on the screen…webpages that would be line after line of pixelated content when zoomed out on a 3GS are completely readable on the iPhone 4, though the text is beyond microscopic."

The internet at the time felt like so many keyholes to look through. Everything before was found in dusty libraries, had been stuffed into artist catalogs, piecemeal, the one "chapter" you saw in person at Abreu or wherever. And Quaytman's paintings magnified the pleasures of this, of a good mystery. Chapters like the catalogs which were being replaced by exhibitions online. The doors of new media opening along with the mystery of Quaytman; it provided its own meta-detective story.The new chapters becoming immediately available and better resolution with each one. Go look at 2008's documentation here. Compare it to today's. We see it all, now pornography is the mainstay, all at once as much as you want. There is little left to the imagination, to mystery. What we had all at the time been following in higher and higher resolution, eventually returned itself as an endless and inconclusive hall of mirrors. They revealed themselves as paintings.


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R.H. Quaytman at Miguel Abreu

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Miguel Abreu surrounds itself in a very distinct aura, it desires so strongly to be fictional literature, like a Borges labyrinth, where fiction is made to feel real, and the library the realest of all, from which entire worlds stem. Not even that Quaytman chapters her work, all the exhibitions feel like arcana and leaden magic where complexity's turgidity make it feel all the more real for its almost bureaucratic commitment to the fiction.  This PR treats us to the tale of a painter chasing an engraving that a philosopher loved so much to own inspiring a much loved passage of text, finding upon finally seeing the work, that something was hidden behind the print, a whole other world, but the thing couldn't be spliced and x-rays couldn't reveal, and this painter, Quaytman, poured over databases and archives dedicating herself to the task of attributing this engraving behind the engraving, a man in black robes. Eventually it is found not from obsessive pouring, but instead "a little luck." And the painter produces a whole new appendix to the chapter about the discovery revealing "an answer that does not satisfy so much as add complexity and mystery to this icon of ideology." Of course its just a google search away, but the point of the Borges story is would you want it revealed?

R.H. Quayt­man and Michael Kreb­ber at Museum Ludwig

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The two most retentive painters around. An anality of one expressive, smeared on walls, and the other's compressed tight to form diamonds of expression. Krebber is the embodiment of a public's contemporary art fears, the disordered body, Quaytman's crystalline structure a slick transparent version. Either way its desiccated enough at this point to be allowed into clean halls of adult history.

see too: “The Contract” at Essex Street, Michael Krebber at Nagel Draxler, Michael Krebber at Daniel Buchholz

“The Contract” at Essex Street

(“The Contract” at Essex Street)
Artists: Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda, Maria Eichhorn, Wade Guyton, Hans Haacke, Park McArthur, R. H. Quaytman, Cameron Rowland, Carissa Rodriguez

Haacke’s overt literalism was due to its merely exposing what was read between lines, its belief in the act of transparency. Oddly everyone in this exhibition - which takes its title in reference to Haacke - makes work that is overtly opaque, obfuscating and mysteriorizing itself in the opacity of its use of cultural symbols. If Haacke’s work was about transparency in the value extracted from art objects, the rest of the work in the show is about contemporary art’s extraction of value/content from culture, complicit in its own theft of value, “borrowing” symbols that were never lent. While appropriation foregrounds its act of theft, this exhibition’s implicit form is a possibly insidious version that guises itself as a form of critical doubling. Quaytman’s “borrowing” of Andrea Fraser’s most vertiginous performance, reprinting it under her own brand image - even if old orchard friends - placing even what has become her logo over the top of the image, what is this but a strange form of theft among friends? Is this exhibition an homage to "Haacke’s" seminal contract, which attempting through transparency to ink slight power to artist’s, or a simple vampiring of cultural capital of it, placing artists, literally, around it as if osmotically credibility it would absorb.
"Haacke’s" poster, contract, and idea was free; I can’t imagine anything else in this show is.