Anna Glantz at The Approach

(link)

Glantz's surrealism has become more subtle, repressed into the paint itself, making you the fool explaining the surface of a face, painting. 

Phillip Allen at The Approach

(link)

Like a food scientist at the forefront of taste, on the eve of the Dorito, artists' approach to consumability is a less direct rod to dopamine receptors yet no less disinterested in creating Fruit Loops.

Sandra Mujinga at The Approach & Angharad Williams, Mathis Gasser at Swiss Institute

(Approach, Swiss)

Remember S.O.A.P.Y? Remember Cameron Jamie? Sturtevant's carnival. The haunted house's continual slow rising but never quite crescendo. (It has to remain lo-budget somehow, for fear of turning to full amusement park.) Object's Friedian presence amped to hyperbole, almost comedy, but these don't seem intent on funny: the camp relief valve, that laughability post spookability, doesn't seem here. Good art is said to haunt you, and so maybe it's brute force attempting that. 

Past: Mathis Gasser, Sandra Mujinga

Hun Kyu Kim at The Approach

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Why do we identify with animals, anthropomorphize them into soft humans. Shouldn't we leave the animals alone? Or is it a means to alienate the world so as to see our own actions as helpless stupid critters. We've been anthropomorphizing animals since pretty much forever with 30,000BCE zoomorphic figurines. Which gave rise to Saturday Morning Cartoons and then now Furries in adulthood. A study showed people were able to identify human traits in simple shapes like triangles and circles, the triangle was bossy, violent, locking the little circle in the room. Angular shapes in general are shown to be associated with "bad" while the curvilinear is associated with "good," which is probably why we love all those rotund creatures drawn with curvaceous softness like every Disney squirrel a Venus of Willendorf. Of course kids are going to grow to sexualize them, franchise films of them, they've been genetically bred for appeal. Crushed by capitalism. Dogs bred for pureness with destroyed hips.

“Splendor Solis” at The Approach

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There's a sort of funny documentation choice, Bosmans' paintings in one photo are in the next photoshop erased to leave the wall behind them, the light doesn't change. It's a small decision mildly touching on the artificiality of our cartoon conditions, reality able to be distressed, bent, stretched. The slow feeling of vertigo and stretch, a malleability we all permanently live under and probably why cartoons blitz across art as the world begins to feel more like them, and we look for things representative of it. Even if the paintings were actually physically moved, it would have taken less time to have been done in "post," after, do things to a moment after it has taken place.

Amanda Ross-Ho at The Approach

(link)

Scale doesn't render well in reproduction, and the shifting relations of scale to the viewer seem mostly lost. The bobby pins and scalpels further enlarged than the white wine, against un-enlarged umbrellas; discordant scales for an unnerving sound.

The “crime scene” - as the PR describes the exhibition - filled with clues as symbols, objects rendered as signs, impressing a (crtl+T) click-and-drag virtuality to the space they inhabit. They become inhuman in their enlargement, no longer calibrated to bodily comfort but instead a fun-house manicism, of the world made slapstick, the clowning gotten carried away to mocking humanism and expressing willful laughter over its needs, forcing themselves upon you by bludgeoning distance with the brute force of size. This glove at distance looks the size of the one on on your hand. The shifts in scale reassert their indifference towards yours. Unlike Mark Manders whose subtle percentage scale shifts produce an uncanny uncertainty, Ross-Ho’s objects have totally left the human world, expressing none of the sentimentality of Gober, but rather a cold aggressive plasticity of its information.
Like the masks central to this exhibition, human emotion is traded for its systematic expression, reduced to sundial rythmn’s clockwork, the phases of the moon, inhuman.

See too: Daniel Dewar and Grégory Gicquel at Micheline Szwajcer