Sergej Jensen at dépendance

(link)

They're still stains, these stains are just better organized, but still interested in rustic materiality, marks on fabrics, deployed with a domestic interest in the vintage, a "warm material" that - as Sanchez is right in pointing out - online spread like a meme of display screen relief, recalibrating our color rods where, in a white world of plastic, it feels good to see wood; which seeing Jensen's painting in person the fetishistic attachment to raw material unpainted was hard not to see in purview of that time's cultural trend leading to that explosion of bars with reclaimed wood everything and newfound reinterest in brass and stone and a sort wish for a return to materiality and sensitivity so prevalent that we should have taken the opportunity to introduce the public to arte povera, and reviewers describing Jensen's paintings like their high-thread-count bed-sheets, this wish for "the natural" that Jensen acquired through accumulating accidents (nature), and so the "painter without paint"(!) couldn't use paint because that would make a new image - which we were all so tired of - whereas stains and bleach and dust were patinas that only referenced age, but now using paint since 2013, but they're still stains in that they are ghostings of history's painting and still totally vintage.

see too: Dylan Spaysky at Clifton Benevento, Giorgio Griffa at Bergen Kunsthall

Group Show at Bortolami and Galerie Neu at Gladstone Gallery
Ian Cheng, Melanie Gilligan, Carissa Rodriguez, Anicka Yi
John Knight, Manfred Pernice, Tom Burr, Klara Liden, Kitty Kraus, Gedi Sibony, Reena Spaulings, Sergej Jensen





Bortlomi
You go see these shows only to be confronted again with its screen representation. Why do you even get out of bed, its representation, historical sediment, becomes the real version in catalogs. Arendt's we're all images to others. All this stuff is on monitors anyway save for Anicka Yi’s art-fetish-displays, or maybe Melanie Gilligan’s lenticulars, primeval .gifs for the real world, the most basic version of affirmed presence, good job you got a bed sort. And eventually with Ian Cheng’s Oculus Rift experiments, not shown here, it’ll all be here. Remember when an artist made Katamari Damacy- that was a sculpture. Carissa Rodriguez’s prints at least suggest a complicit defeat in attempting critique of the new digital supremacy, everyone else seems left-behind in the uncommitment to digital acceleration’s disposibility.

Neu
Which makes Reena Spauling’s poor portraits all the digitally-smarter for their commitment to disposable ideation. Spauling’s whole project premised on every whatever-is-beyond-insipid self-reflexive “art idea” executed with jest, and smart, social cred made to be liquidated and poured through the network of pipes, brilliant. And then you’ve got John Knight actually still dragging real objects across the world, displacing them with antiquated labor-power, and just really the most needless idea of reflexive context art that he’s known for, reminiscent of the sisyphean Heizer’s levitating the mass of his rocks to get his jollies off, and so in the context of all that it makes sense why so much of the other art is limp in these shows, barely able to erect itself in bed in the morning, and because its not hard to get really hard to get up in bed when you’ve got some form of super-cool steroids like all these people seem to have.