Jacqueline de Jong at Rodolphe Janssen

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Stylistic violence never registered strongly in painting. Like Picasso or de Kooning ripping and rearranging people, it's often mere composition. I've never found Guernica all that horrific. Abstraction's pulling reads less like the horror of war and more like the whims of painter. Ambiguous violence - of someone like Miriam Cahn - forces a viewer to complete the picture in their head, imagine their own violence.

Sean Landers at Rodolphe Janssen

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We identify with cuteness, with the interminable wet-eyed critters of Disney, Pokemon, whatever latest commodified and neotenic rodent. Cuteness' pressure causing Pugs' eyes to bulge and esophagus to choke. (The stunted bone structure of Pikachu leaves him in constant pain.) And Landers' plaid animals, sad clowns, and now a pinocchio "plankboy" are the means of a lesser sort of identification. Landers' characters are not focus-group perfected. And their revulsion is "an effect of anticlimax created by an unintentional lapse in mood from the sublime to the trivial or ridiculous." Like Greek mythos for a plankboy or Moby Dick in flannel. The definition of bathos. Which Landers prances sad clown around. Landers paintings "arousing pity, especially through vulnerability or sadness," pathetic.


See too: Sean Landers at Friedrich Petzel

Louisa Gagliardi at Rodolphe Janssen

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It feels more and more that everything is synthetic, made from the same substance, stuf. It feels like our world is comprised of at least someone's putty. We plan a world through virtualizations. Erect bathrooms on plans. Our bodies could be figured for their worth in tile. Tile is cost per square foot, you per hour. Everything exchangeable and thus equivalent, paying you in the going rate of Silly Putty you are made of. Everything a labor, you an object. We stretch you like cartoons at whims to an invisible hand market exchange. The developer sculpts his cities taffy, painters are left their devices.

Betty Tompkins at Rodolphe Janssen

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For all the explicitness and its usual attendant cruelty Tompkins' candid blunt feels tinged remorseful for a subject that is denied the full blood of its humanity, a humanity replaced only with the lasciviousness of pornography - our genitals now denoting smut rather than humanity. Tompkins' Fuck paintings basically beginning alongside the advent of modern pornography's spread, a subject their painting seem to gather back from the photographic a pulse, restoring a faint heartbeat to the grid of measurement, reproduction; Tompkins' drawings are evidence of drawing's relevance in conjuring back something the photograph excises, holding its subject with the ginger hand of the pieta.

Emily Mae Smith at Rodolphe Janssen

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The trend couldn't be clearer at this point, the neo-imagists.

Mathew Cerletty
Orion Martin
Sascha Braunig
Emily Mae Smith
Alice Tippit
Jamian Juliano Villani
Lui Shtini
Milano Chow
Etc.

It's less the digitalization of painting than its conversion to iOS, then made surreal. Like Magritte's redesigning app icons, like surrealism for iPads, like Magritte's rupturing our expectations of standardized images. We today understand icon's intent to be informative with immediacy. Any delay on that causes produces the Magrittean dissonance. The new id eruptions from post-digital dreamlands. But then all those who all already sort of predicted this landscape then:

Christina Ramberg
Diane Simpson
Ray Yoshida
Ed Paschke
Roger Brown
Art Green
Miyoko Ito
James Rosenquist
Etc.

See too: Ray Yoshida at David Nolan, Sascha Braunig at Kunsthall Stavanger, Alice Tippit at Night Club, Lui Shtini at Kate Werble, Sascha Braunig at Rodolphe Janssen, Sascha Braunig at Foxy Production, Mathew Cerletty at Office Baroque,

Sascha Braunig at Rodolphe Janssen

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Mixing op's visual concrete against trompe l'oeil's illusory tricks, the two ends of representation, could make a eyerolling mix but within its surrealism - the "smooth" conditions of clean eroticized bodies - its "affectual package" - like Dan vaan Golden-  having a lot to do with advertising's cybernetic affect this 4th wall smudging version.