Alex Katz at Sant'Andrea de Scaphis

(link)

It is so nice to be effortless. To be a breeze. To be warm winds. God could you imagine trying hard. No one wants to watch someone pedal a bicycle. They want motorcycles leaping chasms. Speed. And not wearing a helmet, or seatbelt, for danger allows you to fuck up the face. Look cool with a broken nose. Do not stop. Guns like brushes blazing. Saying, This / broken nose / makes me look cooler / than the guy / in a helmet of perfection / right? God can you imagine slowing down, to correct a mistake, pedestrian.

Terminal velocity, production itself becomes the product: Brätsch, KAYA, Genzken, Craven, Guyton, Smith, the zombies, the current, etc.

Hana Miletić at Basement Roma

(link)

Knitting being an embodiment of care. (Because knitting is so laboriously outmoded it can only be care, i.e. not capitalism, more love hours than can ever be repaid, etc. Knitting is the province of excess time, and attention, which translates to -anticapitalist- care) And so, now using knitting as a medium representing other forms of care/repair. Like hand grinding paint to depict a pencil sketch or whatever. A sort of redundancy, or analogy? Homology? Tautology? The point is there is effort-over-time in reproducing others attempts at care. Effort invokes effort. (The stitch marks time.)

"Why does "stitching" make a comeback? Impressionism's strokes showcasing its painterly labor. It had been that eventually genius embedded itself into the canvas, itself signifying "art," and blankness was fine. Does canvas no longer back painting's monetary value a priori? Do we need proof of work? Like the ornately etched lines of paper currency, making the labor of reproduction more expensive than the bill itself - proof of scarcity, value. Time equates to money. But now we have copy machines, CNC routers, childlabor and interns. Perhaps proof of work is just nostalgia for when there was infinite time, for when there was time. "

This separation of our social relations we've so completely assimilated that labor itself returns as a literal fetishism, stitches mark this labor, look compelling, can be brought out onto white walls, as aura, as artwork. Every cheap objects is an equal tapestry. The stitches in time are smoother, hidden. Hold up your child's plastic toy and feel another at its end.

see too: 

Stitching: Ryo Kinoshita at Fons Welters, Diedrick Brackens at Various Small Fires, Helen Mirra at Nordenhake, Brendan Fowler at Mathew, Brendan Fowler at Richard Telles

Care: Carolyn Lazard at Essex Street, Park McArthur at Chisenhale, Susan Cianciolo at Modern Art, B. Wurtz at Metro Pictures

Alighiero e Boetti at Sant'Andrea de Scaphis

(link)

1993 was a very strange year for figurative sculpture. You've got the above (which "must have come as a surprise.") But then, same year, you have Paul McCarthy's Spaghetti Man (guess where the spaghetti is), Charles Ray's Family Romance, Janine Antoni's Lick and Lather as well as Mike Kelley's seminal survey exhibition (alongside the Boetti at Sonsbeek) The Uncanny. Kelley's "experiment took its cue from the rise of 'mannequin art,' a term he coined to describe artists like Charles Ray, Kiki Smith, and Jonathan Borofsky, whose life-size sculptures—not, in fact, all mannequins—evoked anxieties about the role of the human body in a time wrought by the AIDS epidemic, the growth of plastic surgery procedures, and advances in biotechnology. In addition to artworks, however, Kelley gathered religious statues, inflatable sex dolls, ventriloquist dummies, wax figures, and medical anatomical models into crowded clusters to eerie effect." 1993 being today. 

Ed Atkins at Sant'Andrea de Scaphis

(link)

"...We continued to live through a distancing world held increasingly close, more finely detailed, not so much nuanced as mictorized: microscopically huge, a memory that was infinite, thoughts reappeared haunting you from underground server vaults, friends since ghosted returned with body supplements. Viral punishment: forever indoors. Forever asked to participate in the rooms where you could be viewed, thumbed, generally commented on. Like suddenly everyone is an artist inviting anonymous critics. A person we liked less you than her. Every teenager learned numbers/statistics by an emotional battery. The bodies got online, got ever more perfect and you got ever more, well, [blistery]."

CAWD wrote the exhibition texts, you can find them here, hosted by CAD.

see too: Ed Atkins

Augustas Serapinas at Basement Roma

(link)

The gallery's neighbor is pet groomer. And neighbors and previous tenants are sorta what Serapinas seems into, using neighbors. Past instances include a locksmith's keys melted into sauna buckets and curtain rings, as well as a neighbor's pen getting into into some bread. In behaved conceptual art fashion is engorges its signifiers with a vitality, allowing the life of writers and press to extrapolate until a blue that's on brand. But this exhibition is much funnier as a literal attempt at represenatational act, attempting to see through walls and well envision the neighbor that everyone writing think-pieces about how we are so disconnected from. A gallery exists next to a pet groomer. Wipe enough fat on the walls and eventually they becomes transparent. People like to see their neighbors in themselves.

Arthur Jafa at Sant’Andrea de Scaphis

(link)

You only get to watch ten seconds of this but you still get feels its promotion. That advertisement creates a lack that can only be fulfilled through consumption it does not allow.

You can watch one whole minute of it here: “Elements of Vogue” at CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo

Karl Holmqvist at Sant’Andrea de Scaphis

(link)

On Holmqvist at GBE: "It's punk plagiarism, sucking out the affective lyricism of the pop ecosystem to flatten out all those very-much-felt feelings into a poetry of surfaces - and tedium."
  - Andrew Durbin TzK

We like words, we trust words, our whole society practically predicted on words, everywhere, ubiquitous, magnificent and fragile. So the Holmqvistic hammering of words into tin for his cymbal tapping repetition could feel either charmingly disruptive or cruel.  Holmqvist has expressed less affinity for jazz than for noise, words become the sensation of objects felt with a numb hand, the cacophony of nerves deprived. A rose is a rose is a rose, there is a long history of this use of semantic satiation: the repeated arousal of a specific neural pattern causing "a reduction in the intensity of the activity with each repetition" - effectively numbs like our hands our ability to perceive them with any force but some wide flat plainness, deprived of structure to give its words lifeblood like sucking nitrous from balloons until the world dissolves into a stupefied vertigo, and we feel the noise, the static of our brains deprived.

Caroline Mesquita at T293

(link)

The PR mentions Giger for whom the mechanistic and biomorphic found waypoint in the skeleton, the complex curvature of the arthropod's organic exo-shell, the crabs and muscle cars who share the PVC fetishist's interest in shiny bulges; it wasn't hard a move to the erotic. And like the Iron Giant for beyond parental guidance suggested, we can anthropomorphize steel so long as it reflects our own curvature: what looks like a wormy finger in one starts to look in another like a butthole. Metal is as malleable as you want it to be, can conform your desire, and thus have no issue identifying our own corporeality with metal. It's when we go on T293's website and look at the additional photos there and realize the butt's hole contains a jagged and unformed hangnail like a fishhook that we reject its allure.


See too: Roger Hiorns at Annet Gelink, Roger Hiorns at ELI Beamlines Center,

Ella Kruglyanskaya at Sant’Andrea de Scaphis

(link)

Now, and having been trending, the world's craving directness, the assertive image qualifying nothing and instead saturates itself in plainness, a matter-of-factness. Straight-talk has, in-fact, steamrolled several countries. The painter caroms off the directness of the sign-painter, of the slogan maker, of the one with such clear thoughts they can can be said in 140 characters or less. It's all there already perfectly plain everything to see, a still life.


See too: Etel Adnan at Sfeir-Semler

Lucas Arruda at Indipendenza

(link)

Keeping the list succinct, Turner, Caspar D. Friedrich, Rothko, maybe Monet, Celmins, the painters and expanses lit from beyond. The self-enamored creating space, letting there be light, like gods, separating the sea and the land, they can paint it, conjure it. Schopenhauer, "Fullest Feeling of Sublime : Immensity of Universe's extent or duration. (Pleasure from knowledge of observer's nothingness and oneness with Nature)." And Arruda's primordial stews both past and post, sunset and sunrise, beginning and end times and all the land inbetween, finding common ground between the heady romantics and the spiritual expressionists and painters between. Recent trends in sci-fi have too increasingly used primordial and lush expanse from Prometheus to Rogue One as locale signifying a shift in representations of "future" no longer mechanistic and barren but luscious clean worlds like Apple ads, the primordial space no longer past but future and become once again acceptable.



See too: Lucas Arruda at Lulu

Marc Camille Chaimowicz at INDIPENDENZA

(link)

Despite their allure, Chaimowicz's object withdraw behind soft facades, using friendliness as a foil. Chaimowicz's objects appear overwhelmingly kind, in pastels and patterning that soften the self, nothing unacceptable to a baby's bedroom. We find this wanton sensitivity almost unnerving in art, we fear the institutionalization of its form, the hospitalization of "sentiment." That Chaimowicz continually seems able to wrest its new versions makes him the anti-HeimoZoberning.

See too: Marc Camille Chaimowicz at Galerie Neu, Heimo Zobernig at Kunsthaus Bregenz

Mélanie Matranga at Indipendenza

(link)

Oversized clothing was trending in 2014 according to one popular art blog. A too-lateness that becomes a pathos. Like showing up to a party with party games while everyone is doing coke off glassware. Yet, the cool kids recognized the option for both, snorting off the board they played upon. Years later in the hindsight of sobriety it becomes a question, that the person bringing the board-game may have known all along what they were bringing. And who looked stupid then?

Heimo Zobernig at Indipendenza

(link)

It's important to note Zobernig's background coming from theater design. Objects which in their replicant mis-rememberance of archetypal painting instead limn its vague caricature, a consensual version, short-circuited to be art that already looks like art. Becoming stand-ins (theater sets) for the contemporary, or its "zombie" version.
In other words their extreme banality incites questioning, and exposes its stage to the skepticism wrought.
The inanity of such an operation might seem at the limits of humane interest, but Zobernig's magisterial ability to continually wrest insipid rabbits from contemporary hat irrupts a manic laughability at the depths of that hat.
The jewels in the rough here work because their showcasing of the exhibition around it proved that they were never needed to begin with.

Paul Cowan at Clifton Benevento , Margaret Lee at Team , Kaspar Müller at Federico Vavassori , Heimo Zobernig at Petzel, Krupp, MUDAM , Seven Reeds at Overduin and co. 

Ettore Spalletti at MAXXI, Museo Madre, Gam



A phenomenal practice that doesn’t take well to criticism. You had to be there, man. The attempt at compressing light/color into physicality. All the things Fried said were latent in minimalism are express here, a theater of an exhibition, It presents you with your own viewing, an experience. Zobernig sans critique, sublime. Vague objects becoming specific in the experience of them. Romantic in its ideal of what it wants you to feel, fetishistic in its trained manipulation of it; pain in the pleasure, the failure in the immensity of the attempt.