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

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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.

Maria von Hausswolff at Johan Berggren

Maria von Hausswolff at Johan Berggren

Recalling deep sea photography above ground of course estranges. Blackness, depth, unknown. The trick is adept, the cinematic isolation of terrain turns it to vignettes of a dreamed world, us tourists, Planet Earth or Alien. They're both the same film, same worlds. As the title implies. Ours is a lovely world, so deploying it as its spectacular self, a fine filmic conceit. And its made almost literal here, moralistic, the cinematographer is the tourist, is the alien. We should probably all be.

Anna Uddenberg and Nicolas Ceccaldi at MEGA Foundation

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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

David Douard at Johan Berggren

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Douard’s big year has sown spaces to be filled, a chain reaction burning interest fueling the expansionism of visibility, a speed of production in which interest generates on the premise that even if not all of it is at least some of it will be, the trade shows of nomadic artists that Duoards asserts the bodily in the trash accumulated, acknowledging the filth of things ready made, the body in the product, in the package, in the excrement of practice, Duoard both reacting to and participating in the cold industry of the system; filthy, disgusting, sporadically humane.

See too. Mathis Altmann at Freedman Fitzpatrick , Michael E. Smith at Susanne Hilberry , Simon Denny at Portikus , Cathy Wilkes at Tramway , Ben Schumacher at Musee d’art contemporain de Lyon