The receding sign, withdrawal, threatening loss, like paintings in the rain. 🥺 sad. "art often feels like a process, technology, for imprinting nostalgia. Casting banality in bronze, silver, with a halo of rose. " The Sontagian elegy of photographs as an Instagram filter. "preserves your recognition like pickled pigs and call it romantic." Pre-attaching its loss, you can almost print it. Nostalgia turning into an industry for creating it.
IN 2014 Alex Becerra was titling exhibitions "problematic whores" and getting reviews in Frieze and LA Times. Lauding him for "the self-granted freedom ... that no white artist would dare put his name to.""clearly feel[ing] no pressure to self-censor, which is a rare thing today, not just amongst artists." Now almost 10 years later the paintings are tame and the "reviews" come from culture magazines. It's a classic shift of the painter entering midcareer yes, but also a measure of how the art world has childproofed itself. No more edge, is it growing up or growing old?
For a century now art has been take x but big. Expressionist childhoods projected at meters square carried 50 years of art. Etc. So no foul here. (And we've said before, big jewelry, brilliant.) If you're going to put the sign on the wall, put the sign on the wall. The sign scales. And scale is a tenuous thing today, it may be the defining characteristic of it. The ability to scale. The loss of scale in image that consumes us. Richard Serra could not build something so big as a sign.
See too: Ana Pellicer at House of Gaga, Amanda Ross-Ho
