Patricia L. Boyd at Secession, Vienna

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The "certifying white light." Of food porn, pornography, and god. Also the gallery. Product photography. To reduce blemishes. Feign omniscience. Pretend to be science, all knowing, objective. If we could remove darkness, spend extra on the intricacy, we would find some kind of truth-identifying substance. We only require extra wattages, a more technical brilliance, higher levels of magnification, detail, analysis. Then it will be revealed. The exhaustion engine. 

Siggi Hofer at Secession

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Painting converting to sign systems, bastardizing the pure expectations; painting begins behaving more like a stop sign. Painters love the functional sign, the sign painter, but capital P Painting can't be given to such pedestrian work. Josh Smith actually painting stop signs proved the bad boy point: painting isn't intended to function. Smith's point negated itself as an eyeroll, expected bastardizing. But when painting fuzzes sign/painting territory the point becomes Math Bass clearer discomfort.

Math Bass at Mary Boone
"It makes for paintings that can be painful, sensitivity traded for force."

Nairy Baghramian at Secession

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"In the last few years the status of a work of art has risen beyond that of mere autonomous existence, to the point where works are sometimes treated like quasi-subjects capable of their own autonomous thinking. ...

One sometimes gets the impression that a work of art can speak, live, and even outlive the artist and hence also artistic discourse. I believe that this work-turned-subject is a kind of monster. Curators, art historians, and critics sometimes nurse this monster ...

The tendency of the art work to be turned into a subject is further promoted by the growing silence of the artist–subject, who thereby threatens to turn him or herself into a self-mystifying object. ..." Nairy Baghramian - "Le Mépris" TzK

 

Emanuel Seitz at Christine Mayer & Tess Jaray at Secession

(Christian Mayer, Secession)

Painting becomes an organization system for color. For "painting". Which then work backwards to find the logic, organization system. Which is something like meaning. 

Lawrence Abu Hamdan at Secession

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It's days like this when you realize you are just looking at promotional vehicles, you haven't left the house in days, the world being advertised to you.  There's no content here, just a dark room for your projection of how interesting this could be. The advertisement.

Tala Madani at secession

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The sketchbook is the imagination's stage, so whatever wet sketches happen in Madani's abyssal paintings already makes sense, they are theaters for whatever projection is put in it. It's a sort of brilliant trick, capable of making them accept whatever, a stick figure becomes the thought/action of conjuring it, thinking it. The painting is the sketchbook drawing from the unconscious onto the theater - which is the virtual projection inside your skull - that is, again, the painting. Projected thought*. When Madani's brush smears shit it bears the shiver of actual, not because it is, but because it feels someone imagine doing it. Reading a story of a murder feels somehow less horrible than finding, even a fictional, scrawled notebook saying how they would murder. Watching someone imagine. The paint - which painting professors will be quick to remind you is just fancy dirt suspended in fats - equates to shit, or cake, or flesh. Light is sprayed like urine. Children bear the face of men, bear the brunt of Madani. Which seem, unsafe for art, being this literal. It is becoming more and more important to be dumb in art.

*So of course they became movies, they basically already were.


See too: Quintessa Matranga at Freddy, Read all posts tagged Tala Madani

Chadwick Rantanen at Secession

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"For his sculptures, Rantanen extracted the protective layer from rolls of new fabric, peeling it off like a layer of skin" like hospital's common procedure on horribly disfigured patients is to shave off sections of intact flesh into luncheon-meat-like sheets then run though a press into a mesh to be grafted over raw violence, like wallpaper pasted for cheery buildings hiding this slaughter, skins of paper garbage caught with arrows like St. Sebastian trussed with nice bondage knots, plastic bags caught in razor wire fencing, our trauma over mass trash hung over industrial steel drain pans portending the dripping we don't see but Rantanen has us inferring looming, like the plastics entering our blood, another sort of sublimated torture chamber type of deal.