James Bantone at Centre d'Art Contemporain

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"Plainly, Bantone is refusing the identification of your subjects and thereby refusing their exploitation." 

Perhaps similar to Pope.L tensioning a joke without the relief valve of a punchline, instead airs uncomfort - Bantone's horror is actually mere refusal to assimilate with a more gentle color. It's obvious but armor against normalization always is, always needs to be? 

see too: Pope.L; “Beyond the Black Atlantic” at Kunstverein Hannover (Sandra Mujinga), 

Maryam Hoseini at High Art

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People bent to composition. A stress positions of beauty. Art's been holding bodies to uncomfortable tasks for forever. Models etoliated on diet coke and fashionable ambitions. Hieronymus Bosch. The garden of hell is scary not because we believe it exists, but because someone imagined it. And really this is painting that demands it, which is just us. Picasso beats his models to a pulp and Jordan Wolfson Real Violence. A trumpet out the ass, regaling. Wine or boiling oil, what difference. Think the Matrix-line virtual plane of painting's imaginative space, where anything can be conjured, and somehow Hellraiser exists, is a franchise. 

See too:Tala Madani, Violence Against Faces

Past: Maryam Hoseini at Deborah Schamoni 

"We like destroying people. Ambiguity in flesh. 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."

Full: Maryam Hoseini at Deborah Schamoni 

Max Brand at Harkawik

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Brand soup is better than generic? The same contents with a different emphasis. An evolution of today's trends: Abstraction AND surrealism. Surrealism as abstraction. An abstraction of. Any sticker placed on these paintings would affect it none. Perhaps that's what makes them great. Like a clown punching bag, no matter what you did, it would not make the painting better or worse, the clown returns to take another from you.

Past: Max Brand

"If you rolled silly putty across Painting's history, you'd have Brand..."

"Seeing the soup for its referents. ... hazy memories of once distinct tastes roiling in the surface. so clarified as to not single out any one flavor, any one referent, everything so blended, you could just keep naming ingredients. Which is where we're at today. Soup is easy to mass produce: a base prepared in advance can be used to a support a wide and readily available ingredients on its surface."


Full read: Max Brand at Off Vendome, Max Brand at Galerie Bernhard

Gabriel Orozco at Galerie Chantal Crousel

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Orozco used to make sculpture. Now Orozco sells tourist art, but as the tourist. Souvenirs not of your travels but his, buying his peripatetic romance. We purchase romance. - this is what artists sell, on Japanese paper. That they are almost literally inkblots is perfect. Because this romance is all you can project into it, interpret it. A diary of plants, us once again reading tea leaves left of porcelain walls, shit. 

The whole premise of "process-based abstraction"'s creating souvenirs of experience is premised on some vestigial trait of conceptual that may never have existed. Like, does On Kawara's "January 22nd 1988" on canvas actually mean anything outside a finger pointing toward it. Does an artist in the forest placing native plants on a canvas actually contain its sound? What information is stored? 

While this was the central conundrum to conceptual art since its inception, the rupture and distance between sign and object (always at risk that its sign didn't actually contain its object) it has since been taken as granted, as a granting agency for value added. .... Jason Rhoades built a career of mocking this value-added system, performing it under absurdly comical conditions, to create his referentially seminal signature: PeaRoeFoam, a mess of so much reference and history and jest that it self imploded. 

souvenirs of experience: Sam Falls at 303 Gallery, their valorization: James Hoff at VI, VII

Tea leaves from the bowels: Yuji Agematsu at Lulu

and of course, inkblots.