Reina Sugihara at Arcadia Missa

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Ode to the oyster. To the folds and frill. To innuendo, guessing. To the suggestive aphrodisiacs. The thing we all see but can't say. The unmentionable. Us all slurping at what's underneath table. That what you see is not what you see. A toast to the suggestibility of the viewer, who holds this oyster in head. Whose head is an oyster, making sense of oysters. Painting isn't a wall, it's a suggestion, interpretability. Inkblots and oysters, they spill the shape of meaning inside your head.

Inkblot

Reina Sugihara at Misako & Rosen

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A deployed ability to resemble. Allude. Hint. Vaguely suggest. This makes an inkblot.  I see a nightmarish tide pool with deep crabs and horror. You see Arthur Dove and your mother. A dark pool for a viewer's reflection. A John Marin watercolor, a corpse of something expensive. 

"But Dohi's resemble, recall unplaceable things, which is our politics now. Resemblance was dirty back then, we wanted purity in forms, because clouded abstraction led to impure thoughts. Why do we desire allusive formalism now? Fecteau, Baghramian, Balema, Nagle, et al. Is still a latent surrealism? The shifting space of ambiguous 'clouds' saying that one looks like a rabbit but never knowing it."

Suggestions: Vincent Fecteau at greengrassi, Vincent Fecteau at Misako & Rosen, Lui Shtini at Kate Werble, Ron Nagle at Modern Art, Nairy Baghramian at Walker Art Center?, Nairy Baghramian at Museo Tamayo, Nairy Baghramian at Marian Goodman Larry Poons at Michael Jon & Alan, Lucy Bull at High Art, Olga Balema at High Art, Olga Balema at High Art (2)

Reina Sugihara at Lavender Opener Chair

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These look old. Probably because no one paints this way anymore. (Maybe Cathy Wilkes' rare painting?) Probably because at some point it became important to not look like 2nd generation abex, because that looked dated, because looking new stood in for being new, and thus painting adopted technology like acrylics and cartoons and metal plating and whatever other process it could cling to its surface. But, with a wide enough historical lens, all painting condenses into the same gooey dumb thing. And these just stand out as strange as weird good things.