Fred Lonidier at Michael Benevento

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Politics aside, which at time when a president-elect we don't like is one of few who thinks such trade agreements are up for discussion while everyone we do like thinks any discussion spells, like, imminent economic apocalypse and a current president who we didn't like but now do but as the opposite rears head and who promised to but didn't enter discussion of said trade - and so what a time for this exhibition - making a real ideological pickle indeed, the work which can't be read with any real ease here and who probably could have stood long enough there, and which proves the book it needs, and so can't easily be read anytime soon and so we interpret it at the level of surface, form becoming the content, the affectual, having all sorts of relation to today, like watching debates with the sound off and which we sometimes did, it looks pretty good.

Daniel Buren at Bortolami

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The ascetic refusal Buren's game of course eventually gives expression to Heimo Zobernig. Buren's game aimed outward as critique of the walls, someone would eventually see the opening and drive it at the art itself. Zobernig wetting the sand beneath feet to prove it was quicksand all along. The mental fart of Zobernig reairs in seeing these, Buren, in trying to ascertain the difference of one but tone. It's the Baderian question of a difference between fire bricks on floor and shrimp on foosball. Of the complete dumbness of objects, their utter asinity. Of course Zobernig needs Buren as his hostage in order to remain in negotiations, and Buren's calm cool continuation despite it, still striping away, is sort of endearing if not insane. The gallery, the institution, looks on with a smile.


see too: Darren Bader at Kölnischer Kunstverein,  Heimo Zobernig at Indipendenza, Heimo Zobernig at Kunsthaus Bregenz, Heimo Zobernig at Simon Lee

Pentti Monkkonen at Truth and Consequences

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"Blanks" is a production term for a material partially formed that has yet to receive whatever finalizing process will finish it, painting, milling, etc. The blank receives all type of process and treatments. The work formed work yet unfinished. They then recieve the processes of production, for Monkkonen the individual sign systems at play, the quasi-readymades applied the blank of painting. Monkkonen who has obviously been playing with painting as product for some time. The bug splatter, like the expressionist's before it, becomes the interpretable tea-leaves of the painting, the same as the cell-phone roach and patterning: signifiers that perform the interpretable content of "Monkkonen." Again treating painting like a blank, a material for production, vessels.


See too: Pentti Monkkonen at High Art, Pentti Monkkonen at Jonathan Viner

Jay ‘J Berd’ Keating at Freddy

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Freddy's low overhead model geared toward the internet and openings returns freedom from certain stakes and pressures making for all sorts of decisions at odds with normalized gallery modes socially reproduced - exhibitions in barns and second tier cities and artists lacking any semblance of social capital (becoming its social capital), unknowns, the tragically unhip amidst the tragic hip and the elderly, which is to say wonky curation separate from the usual sense - order from a different logic - and but still function well - which is what we find so endearing about the outsiders and self-taught artist themselves, including the odd infatuation with color, and - while Freddy is no outsider and - and while the playbook drawn from isn't totally new (like really at all) it's the fact that it's still drawn from by an insider that makes it important to its outsidery quality, otherwise I'm not sure we'd see it.

Amalia Pica at Marc Foxx

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Marble once stood as bodies, now here the prosthetics that infer the body. The space the sculptor once removed has become the more common cultural object. Like formalist lessons in negative space, the vacillation of passive/active object has significance, and metaphorical overtones towards all forms of speaking vs listening, active bodies passive bodies, protests and police: things inform their opposite, and we become the other, create it. etc. etc. etc.


Further inference of bodies by the objects that matter: Park McArthur at Chisenhale, Klara Lidén, Alicia Frankovich at Kurator, Nairy Baghramian at Marian Goodman, Yngve Holen at Kunsthalle Basel

Maggie Lee at 356 Mission

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Coolness is an affect and the point attempted to be made was that adopting these strictures to see the subject express through the grate of social coding was its pathos. Did everyone then just think they were cool then? The loss of self to the adoption of vernaculars. The objects here are the physical embodiment of the grate through which we express self at that moment of earliest self-expression in newfound self-awareness immediately confronted with the terror of self-consciousness. "Gigi is me in 2006." A teenage self-conciousness and the distance as adoption-of-another-subjectivity having a lot to do with art and its performativity.


See here: Maggie Lee at Real Fine Arts

Daniel Rios Rodriguez at Lulu

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The crust laden and the spiritual, it's hard to do sentimentality in art without being an outsider. You can't paint a flower without ironizing its loveliness, your desire to impress this. Sentimentality drips into its performance, theatrical, a too-much-presence and we blush for the artist having fallen into the trap of their own subjectivity for them, too often. Thick paint helps. It alleviates with its own paintertly over-presence, which provides, if not an ironizing, at least a solidarity. The paint expresses materially the same excess as the subject is. Confidence in clumsiness, endlessly endearing, a situation where you'll want to care for them.


See too: James Lee Byars at VeneKlasen/Werner