Elliott Hundley at Regen Projects

(link)

The "just fuck my shit up" school of reasoning paint to canvas. Building armatures to spray. Rube Goldberg device, for displaying juice. Paint will always look good. This is a permanent feature of art - that these gold coins we trade are always already minted, you are just looking for reasons to fill the parameters. A backronym for the trade. 

Liz Larner at Regen Projects

(link)

"Painted trash" sounds like an insult, but it's what we have here. A decorate filth. Framing the more expensive. Does this imbue them a criticality they would lack otherwise? Connecting them to issues at hand? Or a self-inflicted wound, pointing out that the jewels too are just mud with a glaze. Eventually the plastic disintegrates, washes away, and inside the lumps remain. 

Alex Hubbard at Regen Projects

(link)

More and more it's become important that images are "striking." They look powerful on walls or bus stops. Big colorful bonanzas about an inch deep. This is the language of advertising. Painting, it turns out, is the advertisement that advertises itself. Self-advertisement in painting. It's what artists are becoming wise to. You could strap any tagline from Coca-Cola onto these paintings and it would make sense. It's just now the product name is scrawled on the back. Big dumb abstractions sell for more.  For a more complicated take on this transactional form of visual language look at Charlene von Heyl.

(Also, I thought we put a pause on the "process based abstraction" thing after the whole stumbling in search of brains thing?)


See too: Alex Hubbard at House of Gaga (1), Alex Hubbard at House of Gaga (2), Charline von Heyl at Petzel & Deichtorhallen, Charline von Heyl at Gisela Capitain, Charline von Heyl at Capitain Petzel

John Bock at Regen Projects

(link)

There's a goodwilled cartoonishness that overlays Bock's violence. It's like the fun face culture puts over its assertions, the growing patina of fun that you find on cereal, a talking bumble bee selling food to adults.

Glenn Ligon at Regen Projects

(link)

It is, actually, surprisingly enjoyable watching the body of the man disembodied from his voice gesticulate comedy. Without necessarily being sure anything much deep can be read into the gestures, they are hypnotic, and ultimately the film's elegiac meditation feel more and more like a conspiracy clue hunt of insight into the man that we believe must exist. Back and to the left, back and to the left, hoping for the telling moment. But instead you're just watching footage of a man whose head recently exploded be silenced, turned into a monument.

See too: Mitchell Syrop at Croy Nielsen & Glenn Ligon at Regen Projects

Mitchell Syrop at Croy Nielsen & Glenn Ligon at Regen Projects

(Croy Nielsen , Regen)

The artworld's relation to its signs can be confusing. Here one shouts its empty signs, a sound like empty metal struck, the other attempts to deplete its referent to nausea. Both a protest. Different relations to iconography. Both truisms, but of nowhere equal value. Cuffing these two exhibitions to each other to each eat the other, this is CAD at its curatorial finest.

see too : Mitchell Syrop at Midway Contemporary Art , John Baldessari at Marian Goodman

Manfred Pernice at Regen Projects



The documentation fails to impress the sculptures self-relegation, sent to the corner.  Made to appear cast asides. The structures are rigid but the fill, limp; a pathos of lost objects dejected, collected by "cassettes"’s magnetic nostalgic mix-tapes. You could attach all the arcade games of Benjaminian spirituo-materialism, but Pernice's made to ask who could be made to care.
They're depressive basins. An inability to get out of bed, the depressed person finds it difficult to meaningfully construct, to even get erect. Anhedonia. Against the continual rigidifying erectness of R. Harrison, - finally stripped to their commodification essence of perfect reproducible po-mo gems and boring - the loosey-goose game of Pernice is a breeze, a little bathetic, but that's, like, probably the point, you're being made to feel empathy.