Joanne Greenbaum at Richard Telles

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the confusion of painterly terms, parsing the difference in Greenbaum's marks between accident and expression, calculated or automatism. The categories get blurry, Sherman Sam: "which in another era would have been construed as the struggle between the intellect and the romantic." But Greenbaum seems to defy more categories in regurgitating expressive modes, flaunting its social codes like any good hysteric would. The hysteric was made to believe they were irrational, crazy, but they were, really, simply not fitting into the the mores of stifling polite company, even Pollock's "expression" contained within "painting" but these are always teasing something that we might find repulsively not-painting, irrational.

B. Wurtz at Richard Telles & ICA LA

(Richard Telles, ICA LA )

There is now a waste issue called "aspirational recycling" in which "people set aside items for recycling because they believe or hope they are recyclable, even when they aren’t" - no longer just trash clogging our excretory paths but hopes clogging our recycling. Headaches as evidence of anxiety at the hands of trash, of which the Wurtzian model provides a relief in seeing the objects cared for, not amassed in landfill graves but given the second life in carousels. Our aspirations finally lets them levitate, holding them off the ground, where they would become trash. Which they are suspended from.


see too: Paul P., B. Wurtz at Cooper Cole, B. Wurtz at Lulu, “The Crack-Up” at Room East (B. Wurtz), B. Wurtz at Metro Pictures

Michael Smith at Richard Telles

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"That's what I love about these high school girls, man. I get older, they stay the same age"
reflects well the implicit anxiety of men and youth. Both predatory and pathetic.  Their "midlife crisis" or eyed with questions at playgrounds, office hours with required open doors. Then there's the "avuncular" Smith, like the guy failing to fill his quotas at the dealership. His softness a comedy. The aging man, while the youth remain.

See too:  Michael Smith at Greene Naftali

Richard Hawkins at Jenny’s and Richard Telles

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What if we said something like, collage becomes important as the collisions of the world's disparate systems become increasing violent, and the Surrealists and Frankfurters were wrong that irrational juxtapostion wouldn't spark any mass as the world world became the biggest surrealist juxtaposition of all, and that collage in the larger sense - the sense that Hawkins has practiced since the beginning - was meant instead to make "alternative forms of touch" as soft touchdowns, as a sort of pathos? The decrepit sexual patina grown over Hawkins work wasn't always so. There were once clean young men paper-clipped to fields of bright fabric, and anyone was yet to be beheaded.

Brendan Fowler at Richard Telles

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The point here could be an extremely literal material exchange, threads as digital stand-in, stitch count's dots per inch, like The Hunt of the Unicorn bespeaking SNES digital - you can order online digital photographs as woven tapestries  - but Fowler's joyous abandon in overloading material, to "tactility," more so than the crashed photos previous to which these are superior if similar, makes the point at least a physical fun, a materiality cartoonish, rendering digital real, a Wade Guyton even a mother could love.

See too : Anne Speier at Neue Alte Brücke

Dan Finsel at Richard Telles

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Using the power of narrative to make nonsense palatable, rationalized - here a press release more interestingly “askew” than most. Its akin Mullican’s hypnosis as excuse or Rhoades stoner-arcana as imbuing mechanic or Matthew Barney’s phallocentric symbologies as justification for megalomanic libidinal Dalism, going all the way back to Broodthaers who used his own self-narrative-mythologizing as a reflective axe to the institution; Finsel’s method-acting a sort of Andrea Fraser psychoanalytic performance, a less direct Pamela Rosenkranz pyschonautics short-circuiting the reading of staight-edged art intent, making the heart shaped penis butt impaled on a rod appear pertinently ordered despite being anything but, an excuse for something just slightly weirder than most.

See too : S.O.A.P.Y. III at What Pipeline , Pamela Rosenkranz at Karma International

Thomas Eggerer at Richard Telles



The painting’s tension exists in whether or not Eggerer cares about his subject matter. Richter may have shown care for his but then masochistically bled it, and as this cold blood trickled down, through Tuymans and Sasnal, it finally reaches the ambivalence of Eggerer’s young men as vessels. Richter painted abstractions and people to prove his violence toward each; Eggerer paints people within architectures of highly stylized abstractions to prove the artificiality of his vision.