Hend Samir at Real Pain & Sophie von Hellermann at Larsen Warner

(Real Pain, Larsen Warner)

..trends for a sort of hyper-liquidity - hyperbole of the painterly... exaggerated to jest. ...the painterly involves a framework, a subject that bleeds. The painterly requires an object for the brush to caress. 

"Because it seems what we are actually pushing around on the canvas is the cultural object of painting. The canvas, support, oils, were long ago replaced by this mythos, its signifiers, significance."

("Paint becomes simply the candied shell to painting's cultural myth. ..Drawing ripples in surface to activate the beneath, tap the vast depths of painting's cultural wealth, this the watermelon.")

We want the painterly because this is painting's bright jewel - the more painterly it is the more undeniably painting it is, tautologically as symbol. In times of crisis we seek comfort in the familiar - put our money in what's safe. Is this why impressionism is coming back? When painting tends towards its hyperbolization - the ability to be more painterly, more Painting. We see time move in reverse, is this already impressionism?

See too: "Back to the Future impressionism" Genieve Figgis at Almine Rech, Ambera Wellmann at Lulu, Nicola Tyson at Friedrich Petzel, Nicola Tyson at Nathalie Obadia, "Watermelon Theory" Tala Madani

Heji Shin at MEGA Foundation

(link)

Explicitness is hard to deal with. particularly in the subjective: the photographs depict a new subject in the world. Looking away is not an option, the subject may die if no one cares for it and the human with it. You cannot deny this is literally us, you crowned the same as kings with photographs almost daring attempts at conversations of the aesthetic, over what is our most physically objective moment of personhood. What language do we have to deal with this. The glaring red gap in.

“Life Itself” at Moderna Museet

(link)

Kelley's Uncanny exhibition should be restaged every ten years, that was a good one. The word Life provides enough secondary subtext and poetic license, along with the "itself" existential attachment, to provide umbrella enough for any curatorial hand. A lot fits under it, it was the title of Roger Ebert's memoir, obviously alluding to all of film and thus art's examination of the topic. Hard to think of artist that doesn't fit. The idea of staging an exhibition around it is absurd, probably the point, that ha ha of existential loss. Like Holler states as much in common in the PR, any overarching definition of life is going to be incomplete, arbitrary.

Anna Uddenberg and Nicolas Ceccaldi at MEGA Foundation

(link)

Ceccaldi now making paintings like high-school students from the internet, and Uddenberg's physically manifesting advertorial fetish for both tech and flesh in cyborg refresh to Allen Jones, all the odder for their ambivalence.  Both engaged with embodying cultural representations (which might explain the odd cardboard modernism) where identity is emergent from cultural signs rather than any sort of inherence, becomes currently impossible to imagine an identity outside of cultural signs. Uddenberg's recent sculpture are weirder than Jones' because they seem to emerge from the surrealism of culture itself, rather than the artifact of some dirty boy's head.

See too: “About Face” at Kayne Griffin, Nicolas Ceccaldi at Project Native Informant, Nicolas Ceccaldi at Mathew, David Rappeneau at Queer Thoughts