Raha Raissnia at Marta Cervera

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Contraptions to capture the "ephemeral," make it tangible - nets for the schools of fish-like light.  The sculpture sediments feeling into rock; the painter, paint. Ostensibly. We seem to value art for its packaging. At some points in history more ephemeral forms of art were prized, say, songs because we didn't yet have books, and so whether this is a symptom of capitalism or of art is hard to tell. Fish in the ocean do not generate value by swimming, but being collected, in parks or nets. As an entry ticket or its meat. A reservation for entry, a thing to be gathered around.

Miriam Cahn at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía

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They look like drawings made by children to be diagnosed by therapists. And wearing their analysis on their sleeve. There's no confusion as to what these relate. And this should make them mawkish, sentimental, but the hammy naiveté only underscores. So much "bad painting" comes with an ironic wink made, generally, by grown men who affect their idiot savant, pretend Picassoing. These instead are too much, their saccharineness becomes its own abjection. Real stupidity, not feigned.


See too:Miriam Cahn at Meyer Riegger, Miriam Cahn at Jocelyn Wolff, Miriam Cahn at Meyer Riegger, Calvin Marcus at Clearing

Trisha Baga at Marta Cervera

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A genuine gesture to provide the 2D version just to really prove you're not seeing the 3D version, evidence of your distance. But providing the crappy version at least tries. Maybe you've got your own 3D glasses at home. 

Siera Hyte at Cordova

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Like awaking to find the remains of the party with hangover fully in head, touched,  Hyte's littered objects evidentiary to what was, point to the artist as magistrate god hand, party organizer, but it's less requiem than happiness at the post-apocalypse the doors open to nature spilling into ours, the crust of time and hand, the paper that conforms to your pressure.


See too: Susan Cianciolo at Modern Art

Wilfredo Prieto at NoguerasBlanchard

 

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The Rorsharch tests that nature makes. Predators don’t search for meaning. God gives them to ours to mock us: the more inkblot-like mammals resultant from human domestication; wolves, foxes, and bovine undergoing human selection make Rorschach blots appear. Like God putting an easter egg in genetic biology. Messing back a message to those messing you. A good God joke. Whats are cows but a human technology for dairy. A narrative which our artist, well pedigreed in conceptual art, deploys in good conceptual fashion, using objects as representations for talking points. The best of which mutate in the beholder's eyes, an object as phantasm, visions for whoever is seeing it, to then be concretized in words like these, beautiful.

Ruth Root at Marta Cervera

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Like a Yield sign from hell. Dramatically asserting its declarative without reason. Incoherent as a Rachel Harrison sculpture. Organized but staunch against coherence, disorientating. Even when painting in solid elegant tones, Root's paintings never resolved anything fully tasteful. Their garishness precedes them.


See Too: Charline von Heyl at Gisela Capitain

Peter Piller at Projecte SD

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Surrealist juxtaposition didn't need Rosler's knife to collapse the elements together, domestic normativity and war were already covering german magazines apparently. War on the front, woman on the rear, a brand-identity so metaphorically rife its capture like gazelles scatter. If magazines like Life were populist anthropology-lite, Piller's is a sociology of that anthropology that covers magazines, which "when freed from any sort of caption, say precisely nothing, but are in themselves all so very telling." The portraits humans give themselves.


See too: Peter Piller at Capitain Petzel

David Diao at Marta Cervera

Diao’s work is often premised in the metanarrative established over the paintings, the provenance of painting, his own career, his fictional career hopes etc. Here the press release is in Spanish and the painting’s text in Cyrillic alphabet. We’re left with a formal mystery, of architectural bits printed and isolated, repeated, and painted as geometric abstraction, layered, and compared with futurist exhibitions, and then plus the Cyrillic.
The work extends a net of hope-to-be explication around itself, building and deferring and gesturing at itself, a slow-build complexing that structure a space of confusion and doubling back and second guessing. Somehow R.H. Quaytman meets Daan van Golden, weirdly.