Edvard Munch, Trevor Shimizu at VI, VII, Oslo

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Have you seen the chart? This exhibition proves it, the retrograde, paintings like puncture holes, folding the time continuum to wormhole a pencil through it, write an extra zero on the check. 

Trevor Shimizu at Misako & Rosen

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(Someone confirmed, this might count as a water lily. As impressionism. Which is too bad, the prediction is only fun when its suspended... let's say this is post-impressionist water lilies.)

I enjoy late Monet, before his cataracts surgery, the rusting of his pastiche into yellow lumps, all but blind. Their gross mismanagement of color failing to materialize his prettiness. You watch a master, hampered, fail. Late Monet, like Soutine painted a colonoscopy. Shimizu's, ditching the coprophagia, have almost the opposite but equally compelling problem, a prettiness for which there is no reason - you watch failure produce horrible beauty. 

“Crumple” at VIN VIN

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A sort of paganism that pervades. In this exhibition and elsewhere, we smear paint, assemble objects, to arrange something like "meaning." A like-meaning, or an affect of it. A yule pole for every occasion. 

See too: Aaron Angell at Koppe Astner, Solange Pessoa at Mendes Wood DM

Trevor Shimizu at Kunsthalle Lissabon

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, which the inept can be lovable or painful, the bumbling either funny or eye-rolling, and Shimizu's an extended question of which.

Trevor Shimizu at 47 Canal

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The frame had once aggrandized its painting haloed, a gilded crown of thorns, calcifying its divine radiance. Here a painting frames to single out, brushwork to excise from the multitudes, make singular, uniquification, a continually more common process of art for objects that too easily reproduce unchecked; the frame becomes the mechanism to restrain an object from free agency, shackling it to an owner, a place, a home, no digital viewing offered. That the effort enacting such scarcity is dumb matters none, it might as well be.


See too: Brian Calvin at Le Consortium, Trevor Shimizu at 47 Canal, Trevor Shimizu at Rowhouse Project

Trevor Shimizu at 47 Canal

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The directness of its depiction is satisfying like a sign painter's numbers, a dumbness relieving against the muddled intentions of more artistic means. Like late Guston's plodding brush making hamfistedly evident its recording of painting, Shimizu's brushwork is the bones conjuring the apparition, the image's appearance, to be there incredibly plain: a plush otter holding a starfish. Their almost autistic commitment to the deadpan delivery of depiction pityably endearing.


Past: Trevor Shimizu at Rowhouse Project, Mark Grotjhan at Karma

Trevor Shimizu at Rowhouse Project

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Different than Josh Smith for whom production proves the product, Shimzu’s premised on paintings readymade product, that so long as it is painted, so long as it is painting, it is already done. Enjoying Shimzu’s poor materials because something is there, depicted, and that is enough, way more than most.

See too : Ann Craven at Comfort Moderne , Albert Oehlen at Skarstedt