Gili Tal at Kunstverein Braunschweig

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When it rains it pours, cruelly, the abject waste of capital. Rain as the whip. Hammering rain. Against windows, against Lichtenstein's mirrors, returned or exhumed from bin of pop trash. "One does win against rain or repetition," says Rancière about the unrelenting bleak of Bela Tarr films. "the incessant rain destroys all. It has not only stiffened the coat he no longer dares to unbutton. It has been transformed into an interior rain, which springs forth from the heart and floods all the organs." A rain that is mass produced, printed by the yard.

See too: Gili Tal at Jenny’s, Gili Tal at Cabinet

Martin Wong, Aaron Gilbert at P.P.O.W

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Wong's are hard, heavy, enclosing, emphasis on bars, bricks, bricks, more bricks. This was the era of neo-expressionism and this was city's expression, Wong painting what the city exuded, its own abstract expressionism. Bricks clung to the canvas like broken plate brutalism. There's just so many bricks. Very little light. Which against this dull light, Gilbert's figures grow etiolated, leggy, soft. They bend in strange ways. Squishy vulnerability. For all the bad situations they still manage to find a lot of pleasant lighting, lovely pastel color. Wong's get none, the pleasure of color is walled in the red bricks, imprisoned by police blues.  

Past: Ian Rosen

"Rosen is to art what golf is to sport. Removing its physical aspects to magnify its mental and fine muscle finesse of putting the ball in its proper hole with the least sweat. A methodical game for Rosen's name sunk in the proper places of art's social field..."

"A game of gathering artworld credibility... in which you are a pawn with one distinct choice, of saying yes or no, but after that the moves are all already preloaded into Rosen’s game."


Read full: Ian Rosen at The Finley, Ian Rosen at Kristina Kite

Past: Pati Hill at Essex Street

"... that while the Pictures gen treated the world as image (available for all forms of permutable misdeeds), Hill's 1:1 copying seemed far more interested in the objects and their traces, not inherently its theft. Far more Gonzalez-Torres than Sherrie Levine..."


Read full: Pati Hill at Essex Street

Ann Craven at KARMA & Léopold Rabus at Wilde

(Karma, Wilde)

Bird day down here at the dailies. We got scrappy paintings of birds and polished paintings of birds. Birds on blue backgrounds and sticks in the ether. Foliage and naturalism and big ole pizza pie eyes. Painters that couldn't be more different or same. Both rupturing a full connection with their aviary in the warble glass of their eye - painting - a scrappy Craven brushwork or Rabus slight doubled eye surrealism. A crack in the glass that is style, the rupture that prevents full connection to our nature's plumage, a gap to throw our guesses at meaning, the gap is value not the meaning. So they're not just birds, art birds.

Nazgol Ansarinia at Raffaella Cortese

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Fragments, parts separated from their lives, they always seem beautiful, alien. They seem wounded, ominous, their meaning is fractured, in ways that can't be put back together. We place these objects to our foreheads and ask for their secrets, contemplate their use, rotate them in our minds. But this was their use, to be pressed to foreheads, interminably silent, hear the ocean in your head. 

Mark McKnight at Park View/Paul Soto

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The confusion of the machines reading this as "violent content" is almost objective evidence of McKnight's latent own - the algorithm seeing violence, "humanitarian crisis," or corpses in the body of a tree. I mean it is a sensitive photo. Instagram's policies are notoriously opaque, but assuming this was an automated process, the robots choosing violence don't understand corpses or flesh or violence. (Picking a boat out of a lineup of 9 images fools most robots.) Rather they amass a generalized cloud of what violent content looks like. It's in this etherous affect of violence, of horror - removed from a strict concept of corpse - that both you and the algorithm respond to a tree. No so different after all, husks of the dead, apophenic machines. There's more content to that Bernini-like grasping of flesh than the new church would allow.