Adam Higgins at Chris Sharp Gallery

(link)

Drip paintings as hyper realist memento mori? A salad days preserved for years, preserved by "photography's inherent embalm and morbidity." Argument: "But youth should be wasted, sloughed into bogs of our own autumns. Instead [salad's] preservation, feeling always like photography flexing its own ability to do so, holding its pearl while we are like strapped to dying animals, timers and all. Like Imhof's Faust, subjects are forced into becoming advertisements for themselves [for painting], for the thing they cannot hold onto but [art] gets to reap." So you get your big abstraction, at a slight remove, and the humility flies upon it. They're vanitas, all art temporary, your Pollock rots, attracts vermin. This will all spoil!  But only in representation. "Dutch vanitas were also a means for the wealthy to signal their humility through ostentatious displays of said humility." The joke is you get your cake and display a humble cake too. 

Past: Mai-Thu Perret

"at what point is it an "archaeology of modernism" .. and at what point is it recasting its forms in more precious materials, as designer souvenirs of that history? "

"... as the commodes of home catalogs and design-porn magazines. Souvenirs of a high-end experience. predicting the craft object trends. The pottery on everyones shelves, neon signs trending in summer cottages. Perret originally created a narrative of a fictional utopia which "produced" the artworks. All the funnier since the trends that look like hers all premise themselves on the selling of hopeful futures, the crafts we will all already be acclimated to post-apocalypse, raku firing our dreams. Perret eventually got rid of the utopia fiction, and then they became just art, much less utopic."


Read all posts tagged Mai-Thu Perret

Past: Lucy McKenzie

"... the modern question of whether we should believe in the sign or not, the surface or not, like clue boards we're not sure to trust, as the PR states: presenting legal grey areas in culture’s appetite for the genuine."


All posts tagged: Lucy McKenzie

Past: Henry Taylor at Eva Presenhuber

It's a odd property of most paint that you can't brighten black skin by adding white; brown's vibrance is muted by white. While the tonal value is "lighter" the chromatic intensity is lessened...  An artifact in history's poor representation of blackness ... in the paint itself.

Full: Henry Taylor at Eva Presenhuber

Manuel Solano at Carlos/Ishikawa

(link)

The blind painter, it's like a Borges story, we see the creation the creator cannot. The preloaded failure in communication, the age old question whether the tree in my mind is the tree in yours. Why was it important for culture to keep dinosaurs lizard like - we were afraid of boys constricted by feather boas? Puffs with teeth underneath? If these dinosaurs are flamboyant then Jurassic Park's are alt-right. We're not even sure we're looking at the same thing. Different trees.

Past: Raimer Jochims

"There is analogy to be made in the sculptor as an intestinal tract: Freed from the structure and striations of skeletal muscle ... the smooth muscle sculptor digests like an intestinal tube that is artist's erosion in time... just rubbing, frottage until the rocks are tumbled to our gratification."

"Jewels or portals, the tension-confusion. A faceted sapphire is both; painting a jewel for your wall."


Click: Raimer Jochims at Jacky Strenz (1), Raimer Jochims at Jacky Strenz (2), Raimer Jochims at Jacky Strenz (3), Raimer Jochims at Jacky Strenz (4)

Rodney McMillian at Petzel

(link)

Connecting the dots between rooms we would assume those too are fake modernist "decoys" - not precisely art -which, in the longstanding modernist battle to end art, making a fake version seems as apt as anything. But fake art presents the real-fake-doors conundrum - that the fake requires an authentic. Which there wasn't. It's all in service to the trophy - the token as meaning. What is a trophy? And not even sure why we wanted to kill art - but this seems less an attack on art more like attempt at self-deletion, the trophy hunter capturing himself?