Yui Yaegashi at Parrasch Heijnen

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The tiny painting the illustrious gem, faceted like jewels, cut, edged, given intricacy and surface. At such close range the paintings become tactile, physical lumps, etched with strokes. The efficiency and craft of them promises if not to organize your home to organize your thoughts, its aura its own simple organization. Like the now international Muji, or ikea before it, objects which through their own clever construction promise you their better efficiency, an object that promises you its perfection, something so cute you just want to grab it, own it, hold its cuteness so tight you wring its carefully constructed lovely little neck.


See too: Tomma Abts at David Zwirner, Misaki Kawai at The Hole

Alan Schmalz at Truth and Consequences

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Stupidity, enacted with enough impudent glee, begins to edge the psychotic, pathologic, wasting resources, occupying space, and of course its just a gallery so its already a waste of any productivity (depending on who you ask in the artworld) and maybe half of that is point, the Kourus figure here mirrors you and your viewing it: Look closely at its face and tell me its not mocking you. The stupidity here is more comical than the most and the wasting of semiotic resources is more economical than, say, Helen Marten who these share at least some contemporary sensibility, save that these are ready to bring the whole ship down instead of bolster it's tumescence. The PR as poem is pretty good.


See too: “Mirror Effect” at The Box

Etel Adnan at Sfeir-Semler

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Directness often hides. By removing the decisions that brought it to be, clarity is edited and terseness a political strategy that is inarguable. It strips the handles of which one could control the thought. Making a sleek delivery belying its concealment. And the emptiness of Adan's paintings speak to this. Like so much said in 140 characters or less, there is a loss. Occasionally this loss is elegant, occasionally brutally fascistic.

Wade Guyton at Friedrich Petzel

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Guyton began as the perfect Warholian*: a slacker drawing Xs, and killing content in service to the machine of its reproduction, the production proved it and this alongside the fantasy of eruptions tugged from our subconsciouses plugged into the machine and pulled from. Eventually this got boring. The machine wasn't so much able to manifest our subconscious as provide brief illusion that this was possible, that we could print our dreams, creativity, whatever as a perfect reproducible commodity. Instead, they were just commodities potentializing dreams as any other. And so the next perfect Warholian step was to print the newspaper, which itself was like the manifestations of the Giant subconscious of earth people, the newspaper printed was in fact the eruptions of all those subconscious desire's added up, a real freaky thing indeed.

* even perhaps moreso that the direct illusions by the race rioting Walker, Kelly

Furthermore: Wade Guyton at Academie Conti & Le Consortium 

"Print the painting, how cold and deliciously malevolent it all seemed at the time until our own body temperature fell so low to match it that eventually even Scheljdahl felt warm towards a retrospective of them."

Lucas Arruda at Indipendenza

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Keeping the list succinct, Turner, Caspar D. Friedrich, Rothko, maybe Monet, Celmins, the painters and expanses lit from beyond. The self-enamored creating space, letting there be light, like gods, separating the sea and the land, they can paint it, conjure it. Schopenhauer, "Fullest Feeling of Sublime : Immensity of Universe's extent or duration. (Pleasure from knowledge of observer's nothingness and oneness with Nature)." And Arruda's primordial stews both past and post, sunset and sunrise, beginning and end times and all the land inbetween, finding common ground between the heady romantics and the spiritual expressionists and painters between. Recent trends in sci-fi have too increasingly used primordial and lush expanse from Prometheus to Rogue One as locale signifying a shift in representations of "future" no longer mechanistic and barren but luscious clean worlds like Apple ads, the primordial space no longer past but future and become once again acceptable.



See too: Lucas Arruda at Lulu

Gaylen Gerber at Emanuel Layr

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The Gerberian support's proposal of a third party in the usual object/viewer duo, a middleman standing watch to serve you the art, introduces the many others standing watch to bring this to you. The general supports of art - walls, lights, pedestals - are cold inanimate and, generally, ignored, and Gerber's proposition, their filling with blood, sedimented subjectivity, makes the walls seem alive and watching, that though they are painted white they contain just a different behind in them.


See too: Brian Calvin at Le Consortium, Sophie Nys at Crac Alsace

Mary Reid Kelley at Museum Leuven

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You know how your body feels after working an eight hour day. Like this. The cartoonifaction, or puttying, of the body.


See too:  “Puddle, pothole, portal” at Sculpture Center