Keith Mayerson at Freddy

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Mayerson isn’t going abstract. The paintings date over the last number years, mostly 2012, first exhibited together here, and as PR attests some were included in Whitney Biennial’s figure salon.
Mayerson’s proliferating archive of painted images - assiduously maintained on a personal website over a decade of work - swelling over the years, slow roaming among variations, genres, and means, and began pre-Instagram - Mayerson already ascertained the cheapness of the image, in which individuals were trumped by the accumulation and abutment of contents. Each image maintains a content modular in relation to its cohorts, here a full meltdown. An archive of cultural attenuation that, like the Biennial’s recent install, “a non-linear narrative we are asked to complete ourselves.” To become our own detectives of what the gooey form of what his “American Dream”, Mayerson’s, the son of a psychoanalyst, could mean, dripping like clocks, “to channel my subconscious into my paintings and make it ‘real,’” like seeing faces in the wood, like seeing the faces Mayerson sees, like what representational painting represents.

See too : Jana Euler at Kunsthalle Zurich , Jim Shaw at Metro Pictures

Isabelle Cornaro at Francesca Pia

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The Spoerri/Nevelson mashups are fine, but the simplicity of Cornaro’s videos make them feel tuned subliminal, a primeval filmic language that in the true stupidness functions sub-haptic, like submersibles, unable to be rationalized, a sort of commercial eroticness. A brilliant real dumbness, whereas everyone else was only feigning it.

See too : Isabelle Cornaro at Museum Leuven , Ida Ekblad at Herald St.

Kaspar Müller at Société

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And see here Muller inhabits the generic image of lake, Lake Zurich, and although the images are “his,” their interchangeability with any lakeside photograph known from a collective memory, produces an opaque identity; It is hard to see “Kaspar” or his subjective "hand" through the photographs "which contains things under its surface that can’t be seen. It’s like a mirror in which you search for deeper things, but just reflect yourself. One will want to read something into it, force it even, because it’s not acceptable for it to stop there. Only very hard-boiled reception would leave it there, then it would feed from disappointment and tragedy because more was expected. But one might assume there must be a dark potential. Or a twin potential. That there must be another side. If not, the rejection of any depth would almost amount to aggression." A photograph as severance, a wall between you and Kaspar like a guillotine.

See too : Kaspar Müller at Federico Vavassori , Seven Reeds at Overduin

Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda at 356 Mission

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In the smoke of Matias Faldbakken's rocketship ascendancy the artworld was left blind scrambling to adhere a politic for it, to make a critical foundation for the artworld's hot new power iconography, unable to accept that how it looked, rather than any little content it contained, was its appeal.*

But so Maeda and Chung deliver today’s dealings with the legacy of conceptual art’s poetics, i.e. a look that connotes a critical intelligibility (meaning) at the same moment appearing elusive, a withholdingess prevails. It produces the look of an enigma, and with it the attendant lure, reading between the lines of evidence evinced. An imbuing of its images/objects with potentialized meaningfulness, making a dissonance that ramps up the aura of even rubber lain on a floor, of cheap bookshelves and its remnant objects, of a decade of art dealing reduced to its minutes, a text that like Warhol’s diary finds initial interest in the search for rumor and gossip but eventually finds humanity in the piecing together of human lives lived.


*(Who in that moment didn’t want have to their big fuck-all paintings and sell it too. The ironic self-awareness of Faldbakken’s sculpture, like Fontaine, made its recycling of an already co-opted language acceptable, the viewer being smarter than the sculpture a sales value added.)

See too : Nina Beier at David Roberts Art Foundation , Mathew Cerletty at Office Baroque

Sturtevant at Thaddaeus Ropac

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Dynamo for so much of the 1960s art world, Oldenburg was also, at times appallingly, no cartoon. (Séance Hannah Wilke.) Did an artist with such psycho-aesthetic investment in the invagination of commercial space ever stop to consider what might happen if, courtesy of a wildly inverting repetition, the phantasmatic derangements of capitalism or branding embroiled in his concession shoppe and its merging of philosophical and commercial notions re-rendezvoused to, vagina dentata-like, bite him in the ass? 

- Bruce Hainley, Under the Sign of [sic]

Sturtevant has extracted a few breathless acts of writing brilliance from those attempting siphoning of the mind's gymnastics ascertaining what, exactly, one sees seeing a Sturtevant. The murky dilute comedy of painting above as example. What one would wish for now is an almost exacting unpackaging of a Sturtevant object, a sort of T.J. Clark vivisection of the animal, dead on the table but understood, a Monsieur Sturtevant's Hat, would be something.

See too : Sturtevant at MoMA

Group Show at Greene Naftali

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How quickly this work has accumulated the look of the academic.  Possibly because it all went in hand with the theory that consumed it as their banner in its initial flourish it has as quickly dehydrated in the burning of its moments usefulness. Harrison’s dissonant abstraction, packaging the painter's studio schizo positioning of inside/out, its initial edge worn to the look of safety scissors in its childlike spoils. Or as recent as 2008 writers speaking of Krebber’s ability to “make us nervous” or in 2013 still describing his second 2003 Greene Naftali exhibition, “these works were if anything even more unfriendly to critics and collectors expecting a show of Important European Painting.”  Yet who today is really nervous about these text paintings. Surely for all the descriptive language of “evasion, deflection, deferral and refusal; diffidence, apprehension, ambivalence and doubt” and the sloganesque “preferring not to” Krebber’s greatest “evasion” was his willingness for absorption into those so willing have him, the conceptual disposability of a practice premised on the initial shock of the “evasion” in plain sites, readied for gallery’s recoup, to be making the most historically assailable paintings around. A horse on a wall as if mocking it all from behind the wall of the institution. The murderer dreaming not of the murder but of tacks placed on the map of the detective.

Group Show at le-1

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Graw surmised returns of sculpture’s figure as inalienable from its subject as commodity, particularly Harrison/Genzken's:

THESE SURROGATES thus reveal the embattled subjectivity at the heart of what Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello have famously called the "new spirit of capitalism," which demands the exploitation not only of labor but of personality, emotions, social relations, and other noneconomic aspects of our individual lives. Since this new regime works on and within subjectivity itself, even absorbing it into capital's own flows, Harrison's and Genzken's recent sculptures could be seen as delivering what is currently most in demand: subjectivity as a product. It is hard to decide, in fact, whether these works merely satisfy the current desire for staged subjectivity, or whether they exaggerate it in order to point to its problems.

4 years later human invasiveness find artists still struggling to refoot it in view, depicting it not in the commodified space of the real but in virtual space of video/painting where desire is the limit to treat it like a grotesque punching bag, finding glee in its horror.

See too : Andro Wekua at Sprüth Magers