Judith Hopf at Museion

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An sculpture of bricks hyperbolizes its thingness: functionless and heavy and constructed that way. Each brick lain representing a decision by the artist to continue. Emphasizing some of sculpture's more stupid aspects of raw difficult to transport material in a world of virtual connection. It's comedy to give so much weight to such banal objects. And in the background those concrete boxes we read as cute sheep as a joke on our desire to attach ourselves to such dumb objects, the pathetic so obviously endearing. They are very cute, those concrete rectangles.


See too: Judith Hopf at kaufmann repetto, “Puddle, pothole, portal” at Sculpture Center

Past: Sarah Morris at Museum Leuven

"Programmatic expansionism..."

Josh Mannis at M+B

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Like Bonnard having grown up on the Simpsons, or Junji Ito by way of Matisse, or whatever the references listed in the PR that collapse into today's soup like bits of flavor in the overall story; the return of various forms of figurative art seems to be clever structures from which to hang painting strategies: The structures seem to be slightly infected comical situations overstretched with the representative style. Avery Singer to David Rappeneau, Jonas Wood to the interminable variations found in art fairs and group shows.  The comedic underpins to all these hold the paint at reasonable distance, a distance overtaking the same way flatness once did. Flatness was the "truth" to painting that these paintings today create so much distance from.


Jonas Wood at David Kordansky, David Rappeneau at Queer Thoughts

Richard Hoeck and John Miller at Meliksetian | Briggs

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The stupid comedy of our anthropomorphized figures meeting grizzly dismemberment cast down cliffs, their odd hollowness standing in for all the blood and guts that should be splattered. That we actually identify, sympathize, with them, these reflections we adorn our stores with. What use does a culture have for fake images of ourselves. The Doryphorous has a reason, an idealization, a mannequin, devoid of his saleables, none.


See too: Jordan Wolfson at David Zwirner, Peter Piller at Capitain Petzel, John Miller at Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, John Miller, Dominik Sittig at Nagel Draxler

Barbara Bloom at Capitain Petzel

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You see son, it's emotional impact is its inability to tell you.  It can't fully delineate, er describe the thing it references, which makes you imagine something beyond what it's capable. You try to imagine a potentional, son.


See too: On Kawara at the Guggenheim, Oscar Tuazon at Le Consortium & Paradise Garage

Paul Thek at Hannah Hoffman

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The scraps and remains of his practice. An artist who formulated his own death, his tomb, lost and the grave robbing plunderers the institution would take a page from the book of, assembling artifacts. Much of Thek's practice was already fragmentary, funerary, reliquaries, so it makes sense now to steal a notebook page and place it behind glass. How peculiarly prescient Thek seeing all the methods of preservation and archive and entombment. The warmth of the page now resembling the boxes of meat then.


See too: Paul Thek at Mai 36

Oliver Payne at Overduin & Co.

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Payne' treats ideas as objects that can be held, manipulated, attached. Each object illustrative of a concept. The PR's Miller's Law, you can hold all seven in your head and juggle them if you like. The main theme of them is macro to the individual to the commons, swarm intelligence and so on and so forth. This like Conceptual Art itself where objects become representations of concepts, where objects are not individuated things governed by a rule set and thus exchangeable. The opposite of the object oriented oncologists. Not the drawing on the wall but the instructions which allow it to be placed.  Certificates of authenticity governed by critical mass of belief, and bitcoinian Blockchain. Watch the one man rave. The singular object becomes representative of the concept and manifests the commons, the Dance Party. The psychoactive element is seeing the singular and knowing it as concept, manifesting the dance party without it being one, the thing as only a representation of concept, Platonic Psychosis.

There's another Miller's law, oddly of the same Miller:

It instructs us to suspend judgment about what someone is saying so we can first understand them without imbuing their message with our own personal interpretations.

The law states: "To understand what another person is saying, you must assume that it is true and try to imagine what it could be true of."

See too: Nina Beier at Croy Nielsen, Darren Bader at Radio Athènes