Tomoo Gokita at Taka Ishii

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You can do incredible violence with a painting, with a stroke you can mutilate. The horror film and the painter implement similar meat. Spielberg: If I wanted an emotional reaction from I audience I could merely kill a cat. And more than one way to skin one, Gokita runs the permutations of it, taking the Borremans or Tyson turn here, the paint as flesh. Watch a body be melted, a face cleaved. A flower erupts a deformity or berries, it's difficult to tell, something the horror film cannot do: a painting's wayward stroke contains an ambiguity that is interpretable, abstract, like previous Gokita paintings.


See too: Michaël Borremans at Dallas Museum of Art, Nicola Tyson at Friedrich Petzel

Ei Arakawa at Taka Ishii & Peter Halley at Modern Art

(Ei Arakawa at Taka Ishii, Peter Halley at Modern Art)

Arakawa's funneling of history into technologic codes (1959 Gutai represented on arduino Lite-Brite) isn't so interesting a metaphor for whatever societal technologic umbrella* as it is for artists use of history as content pre-legitimated, as a caricaturesque. And CAD's comparison to Halley here today is apt: expressionist rendered binary, computational, circuitry and cells. History reappears, history still shines through, but you get to exist as it. "Contemporary Art, a system in which the production of artistic meaning is itself made clear as a series of gestures and movements that encode work with whatever aura is distinct to contemporary art separate from the objects subsumed."


See too: “Room & Board & Crate & Barrel & Mother Vertical” at Midway Contemporary Art, Karl Holmqvist and Ei Arakawa at Overduin & Co.

*e.g. PR's "Furthermore, the digitalized and re-appropriated paintings question how our current digital condition and networked society influences the state of painting"