David Rappeneau at Queer Thoughts

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“Henri Matisse painted pretty pictures during one of history’s ugliest eras" and Rappeneau draws apathetic youth in one of the most disquieting. Further references: The Pieta, Starry Night and Tamagachis: the youth are bored, despondent, they are nervous and pallid, but worst they're nostalgic. Cylindric reference reflects in anamorphosis to project history as bigger than it, in a point that culminates here.  Looking back to see yourself reflected in the glass already containing all the gold you can fish, to find yourself trapped on the silver side of the mirror, your reflection. And Rappeneau's endless inscriptions in this silver surface, this hypertrophied advertorial ennui embodying all the post-manic fallout of DISmagazine, its fatigue, is brutal, tiring.


See too: David Rappeneau at Queer Thoughts

Peter Shire at Derek Eller

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These are like comedy for the eyes. Absurdifying the visible. Like if god made flowers as a joke.

Erika Landström at Federico Vavassori

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Fatigue of "provisional painting" against its inability to die symptomatic of its comfort. The fragment projecting inconclusiveness. Allowing a build your own aesthetic adventure of possible completions, denying the definitiveness whose edges we could possibly find distasteful. Placing information on the table. "You complete me,": a surer sign of attraction. It's nice to know a painting cares about you. Not to instruct you, but be with you. Friendliness in painting. This is all on you.
It's that prophylactically-sexy glass wall behind you that's the scary thing.


See too: “Seven Reeds” at Overduin & Co. , Tony Conrad's Glass,

Reena Spaulings at Chantal Crousel

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Reigning champions of the dumb art gesture so profoundly, inertly, token as to rupture any semblance of hope for meaning; it found comedy in the malignant stupefaction of the "art gesture." Proudly took the hot wind from the sails of conceptual structures moving art and blowing hard.  The work actively attacked the insider: anyone who understood Spaulings game did not receive art's usual self-congratulations but the unloading of 40 foot soldiers of uncommon stupidity inside your head. A virus affecting only those in-the-know while the blissfully unaware remained free of its belittling folly. Writing this, I've actually needed a thesaurus for "dumb." That the work draws heavily on Kippenberger's "paintings as excuses for their titles" or Club Paint's even more beautifully perfectly asinine paintings matters less than none: the derivativeness actually aids in amplifying its flat hammed power, the more you get it the more it evacuates.


See too: AA Bronson and Keith Boadwee at Deborah Schamoni, Martin Creed at Hauser & Wirth Somerset, Merlin Carpenter at Overduin & Co.

Cooper Jacoby at Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden

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The Microbial Home, on which these are based, is a fantasy fetishizing design as control, and already, hubristically, forecasting this control onto the Nature it assumes will yeild to it. It's a pretty fucked up proposal, surely. Bees are lovely, but not lovely enough. They must be sold, and thus must be packaged. Jacoby's recasting the bee houses as foreclosed slums would seem to be a critique predicting the ends of these best intentions as in the production Detroit hive like a colony experiencing its own collapse, the ends of production utopias, if the art weren't so sexy too. Like Timur Si-Qin or any of the other techno-fabulists, critique of power often comes with the fetishization and deployment of it, with all the sex that sells in a sort of post-apocalyptic gloss we all seem to have some type subconscious drive toward, this death.


See too: Timur Si-Qin at Carl Kostyál, Simon Denny at MoMA PS1, Ben Schumacher at Musee d’art contemporain de Lyon

Luigi Ghirri at Mai 36

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Which always making reference to its framing, to the vision of its photographer, and reflexively photography itself, and thus its artificiality, casts the photos as rubber substance of malleability rather than the hard stuff of "documentary." Rather than the total staging of Wall, or the total rendering of today's, Ghirri's photographs stress the elasticity in the making the real, an otherworldliness manifested by the photographer which, like Ghirri always taking photographs of other photos irrupting new dimension in our world - a strangeness if there ever was one - the view is the subjectivity of the viewfinder, not what the photograph saw but what they made reality be, or something, a weird and rubber world. It's a subtle and hallucinatory effect to see continually see the subtle distortion of the world by its photographing.


See too: Peter Piller at Capitain Petzel

Avery Singer at Stedelijk Museum

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Remember that scene in the Matrix when, readying for climax, they enter the blank void of the virtual and conjure a Babelinian library of weapons? Whatever the power of its virtual blank slate - despite its seeming infinince - it couldn't conjure a rifle outside of what any American police force would already own, revealing severe limitations of its virtuality to the pre-existing commodities already found in its prison-like realm. Whether this digital limitation was an artifact of its virtual script, or the inability of the actor/agents to themselves think outside their commodic prison* it showcases an inherent issue with the power of the virtual as still limited to human ability to think outside itself.

The virtual "White Room" is obviously a metaphor for a blank canvas.
This impotence in manifestability still inherent to primitive modes as it irrupts again in new technologies.

Like Guyton, the digital expression comes with the promise of fuller possibility that anything thought can be rendered, that the blank white space can be filled with anything you can dream, printed direct from our subconcious but reveals our dreams to be mostly the same but with some effects added.

*and thus tragically reveal themselves to be stuck in their own learned form of The Matrix's prison, i.e. never truly free having already internalized the dominant order.


See too: Wade Guyton at Academie Conti & Le Consortium, Tala Madani at David Kordansky