Alice Neel at Xavier Hufkens

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There is no more ecstatic comedy than Alice Neel painting a face like a car accident, all shrapnel and torqued metal, and borderline flesh hanging from crumpled undercarriage. Painting a mirror in the slow process of shattering. (Zoom in on brushwork better rendering shucked oysters than lips.) Neel is a master of angles that shouldn't human - instead the frog spawn abstraction of late Rembrandt. Faces are funny, a cruelty that Neel somehow doesn't make painful. Instead micro-events of painting blasted across and endeared to our gumlike faces. 

Lynda Benglis at Xavier Hufkens

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Everyone owes a big [x] to Benglis. The "unspecific objects." What made her outré from post-minimalism then is everyone's laurels today. The "theatrical," an excess of reference, too many things at once. I don't even mind the gold bronzini in the other room - sometimes you get to give yourself a trophy. 

See too: Pamela Rosenkranz, "Bodily Innuendo", Nairy Baghramian, Ron Nagle at Modern Art

Sterling Ruby at Xavier Hufkens

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One of the last of phalloaggrandized, a dude in denim with big "objects." Ruby turned size into a quality, blasted with whatever goo could be pumped. Cady Noland with a better and less critically engaged budget. They're supposed to be dumb - this is their ostensible critique. And it is true, seeing sculpture bumped to 18 feet resolutely failing to signify or even really mean, this is affecting. It's watching the big meaningless be enacted like a mountain. Wasteland hippie at size. Selling the experience of Nihilism for those with too much money to experience it themselves. And now as always selling some of the rubble at more manageable scales, as souvenirs for your walls at the cottage.


see too: Matias Faldbakken at Astrup Fearnley Museet

Walter Swennen at Xavier Hufkens

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which despite the overall inanity of most, does occasionally yield spark, an occasional brilliance in darkness, that dies, and leaves one wondering what light there ever was in the first place, and when its dark its almost chilling levels of it, sort of begging you to hate them. "Quinn Latimer has described Swennen’s images as non sequiturs. But is there even a logical sequence from which to remove them?"

Walter Swennen at Xavier Hufkens

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Flat-footed painting, and the precedent to today's Richard Aldrich or Allison Katz. There is a distinct aversion to deftness. Swennen's painterly literalness: nothing hidden, there is no magic, just the object and just the plodding painter's sisyphean onus, push paint. It makes an image. The interest in this hamhandness is in never pulling the same gambit twice, still producing some object interest while lacking any painterly ambition whatsoever. Doing so with half the sleeve of tricks of most painters, almost ascetically so.