Zhiliang Zhao at Lulu & Hélène Fauquet at Édouard Montassut

(Zhao, Fauquet)

Two strategies in our current glass. One manifests an excess materiality as defense - declarative flag in mud. The other exacerbates glass. That we look through so much glass today has refracted art to implicitly shift around this invisible structure framing our experience: this why we see so much mud today, so many cartoons for instagram, so much iconographic surrealism with the depth of iPad. The world is viewed predominantly through these lenses, through lens, glass, 4k screen. Seeing Jasper Johns in person like viewing a woolly mammoth at the history center. "Oh they have art on computers now." We bend around and through it. We've been saying this for a while are you bored yet?

See too: Tony Conrad's Glass, Materialphilia, Federico Herrero at Lulu, Rose Marcus at Night Gallery, Hélène Fauquet at Edouard Montassut 

 Past: Hélène Fauquet at Edouard Montassut 

"And we get pristine jpegs of bad ones, printed. En abyme, we tumble"

 Full: Hélène Fauquet at Edouard Montassut 

Maryam Hoseini at Deborah Schamoni

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Ambiguity in flesh, always fun. We like destroying people. Bend their limbs like pipes for decoration, from Bacon to Matisse, Bellmer, Picasso, axe blades to the human doll. Gore from the 80s. To form a pleasure.

Portals Misako & Rosen, Tokyo

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Goya painted some black paintings but even the well fed generals contain hell. A pallor in dough. Looking into the fire in a Night on Bald Mountain are nudes that burn. The Maja's autopsy. A fire vacant like Goya's eyes.

Emma McIntyre at Air de Paris

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Amazing how far we've come. 10 years ago Josh Smith was ironically fucking himself on canvas, Joe Bradley's neanderthal nappies were thought the bedrock of low, stoopid fun. Kerstin Brätsch's fake import/export DAS INSTITÜT. But the ironizing of the sign only serves the delivery of what we really wanted: big juice, canvas, double gulp size. Irony allowed for cake and its excuse too: this was sugar free painting, a critique or whatever. But "the sign will always triumph through the screen of an ironic signifier." And eventually someone realized they didn't need a delivery vehicle for cake. And so now today here have it, full blown painting Tang.

Past: Emma McIntyre 

"is this an argument/ante/gambit for unambiguously pretty painting? Bogs of the saccharine, positively. Don't sleep on this... this PR uses no ironizing verb. ... This would all seem slight if it didn't feel like an opening readied for crowbars edge. The last line earns its dystopian threat, the window wrested open to the "new horizons in contemporary abstract painting."

Full: Emma McIntyre at Chris Sharp Gallery

Nairy Baghramian at Secession

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"In the last few years the status of a work of art has risen beyond that of mere autonomous existence, to the point where works are sometimes treated like quasi-subjects capable of their own autonomous thinking. ...

One sometimes gets the impression that a work of art can speak, live, and even outlive the artist and hence also artistic discourse. I believe that this work-turned-subject is a kind of monster. Curators, art historians, and critics sometimes nurse this monster ...

The tendency of the art work to be turned into a subject is further promoted by the growing silence of the artist–subject, who thereby threatens to turn him or herself into a self-mystifying object. ..." Nairy Baghramian - "Le Mépris" TzK