Past: Nairy Baghramian

"...bodily stones complicating the minimalist mantra that 'what you see is what you see' because what you see is sometimes sexually confusing, leather seats looking like the lap of a taught, tan and naked man. The cigar that just might be, or rocks that just might not. A “bodily” different from its post-minimalist reassertion: entendre produces uncertainty in polite company..."

Nairy Baghramian at Walker Art Center?, Nairy Baghramian at Museo Tamayo, Nairy Baghramian at Marian Goodman

Alex Olson at Park View/Paul Soto

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A sort of lacking taste commendable, nice really, being this against grain: "explosion in a Harlequin factory"? in a flannel factory? Some kind of outburst in pattern manufacturing. Though the detonation is methodical, making the Jonathan Lasker-like gameboard of painting appear. The sort of sport of painting.  That these acknowledge. Because anything this incommensurate with elegance is about something other than pleasantries. 

Martín Soto Climent at Michael Benevento Gallery

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Sprinkling charcoal through panties, you would think these would be sexier than they are. Gartered paintings instead cut and and framed to chaste design, to art. But what is sexy has been ruined by artists for years, bodies crumpled like cans for composition, for harmony among shape, among mind, and so these have a long lineage to work with.

Flaka Haliti at Kunstverein Friedrichshafen & Sreshta Rit Premnath at MIT List Visual Arts Center & Yuki Ikenobō at Tokyo Gallery

(Haliti, Premnath, Ikenobō)

Metal, water, winter. A cold spring. The world blown apart and reassembled. A world compositionalized. Three distinctly different backgrounds give forth through a selection process something that resembles a general feeling acceptable. Because we're looking at the world through the same selective peephole. Or is it our pattern seeking monkey brain. But its gone from soft to cold right?

 Past: Lynette Yiadom-Boakye at Serpentine Gallery

"...reminds one of the entirety of a historical lineage of failed attempts at it by white painters getting it stubbornly, wincingly, wrong, from orientalism to the particularly inept Dutch to Eric Fischl  and the spectacular failure of Elizabeth Peyton's initial foray into it.."

Read full: Lynette Yiadom-Boakye at Serpentine Gallery

Leslie Thornton at MIT List Visual Arts Center

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Aren't these images such a soft paternal voice, a soft authority. The chairs gathered before. Balanced delicate image. Someone was paid to take it, to touch it up, to paste in the images which would otherwise be blown out. Not really a real image, they are a mockup of your experience. How you could, how you should. This is the water of our "contemporary art experience." All silver. Reflect.

Yui Yaegashi at Parrasch Heijnen

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There's value in expunging. Calm, an app that "monetized doing nothing" recently valued at 2 billion dollars. Or Marie Kondo selling products to help you get rid of yours. But more there's value in making something noble, moral. Vices turned into connoisseurship: it's not alcoholism it's an appreciation for wine, now "natural" wines. And these sell temperance, withholding, from the big jouissance of painting. There's an analogy to certain kinks. Where painting out provides the pleasure.