Caroline Mesquita at T293

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The PR mentions Giger for whom the mechanistic and biomorphic found waypoint in the skeleton, the complex curvature of the arthropod's organic exo-shell, the crabs and muscle cars who share the PVC fetishist's interest in shiny bulges; it wasn't hard a move to the erotic. And like the Iron Giant for beyond parental guidance suggested, we can anthropomorphize steel so long as it reflects our own curvature: what looks like a wormy finger in one starts to look in another like a butthole. Metal is as malleable as you want it to be, can conform your desire, and thus have no issue identifying our own corporeality with metal. It's when we go on T293's website and look at the additional photos there and realize the butt's hole contains a jagged and unformed hangnail like a fishhook that we reject its allure.


See too: Roger Hiorns at Annet Gelink, Roger Hiorns at ELI Beamlines Center,

John Baldessari at Sprüth Magers

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The text's irrelation performs the poetic fissure lamely, mechanically, i.e. Baldessari's engineered breakage of logical closure, conclusion. The space we rush to fill with guesses, the INTERPRETATION of art, that interminable precursor to MEANING. The poetic is the process for staging these interpretive fissures, founts for guessing, which Baldessari's plain creation of feels like a corpse made to dance. That dullness feels a point.


Also these look a lot like Vern Blosum at Kunsthalle Bern and see too: John Baldessari at Marian Goodman

Mathew Cerletty, Julia Rommel at STANDARD (OSLO)

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Boring at two ends of the value spectrum for painting today, meaning and object. At one end the object is valuable as a cultural emblem, painting, of historical accreditation, of a history of painting, and so Rommel makes the object structurally flaunt itself, give paint a stage upon which to display itself, paint, stripped and naked before us, and at the other end Cerletty's use of painting's cultural valuation for meaning turned into a puzzle game of clue boards of symbolist rubik's-cubeification, bright figures twisted and turned for you to puzzle over, man's search for meaning gamified on the board of painting.


See too: Mathew Cerletty at Office Baroque, Julia Rommel at Overduin & Co.

The plane shifts once again, the painting inhabits two views, the window and god's eye, painting looks down upon its subject rendered as it wants.

Jessica Vaughn at Martos

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It is a, perhaps acknowledged, strange way to document the object in such a way as no one will ever view it. These lay flat on the floor, mutating into parallelograms in perspective from your walk around them, yet the camera adopts god's eye view.  Exchanging full information to replace the object's actual experience. This is what you put out into the world to describe the object, not documenting the experience but a diagram for the object. As though with enough information we can we can reassemble the experience at home. This is a trend in art documentation, for brighter shadowless lighting, for total documentation, which like the pornographic adopts total visibility to replace the experience of flesh. Cannot be overstated enough as it is analogous to a shift in our culture itself: abstractions can be used to stand in for experience, decisions made entirely on abstractions, on data. We talk of enumerations of populations with statistical variances, we talk of clouds of points that cannot be individuate but inferred. Like your phone predicting your location, with enough information we can reconstitute experience. So when documentation makes a choice to present images which choose maximum-information (gods eye, not yours) over the camera as stand in for your head, it’s a choice that seems the sediment culture's thirst for raw information.


But then they also speak of our growing preponderance for trash: Chadwick Rantanen at Secession, Kahlil Robert Irving at Callicoon Fine Arts, Melvin Edwards at Daniel Buchholz,  “May the Bridges I Burn Light the Way” at STANDARD (OSLO), Nancy Lupo at Kristina Kite & Yuji Agematsu at Miguel Abreu, Dylan Spaysky at Clifton Benevento,

“In Vitro” at Bodega

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This is an interesting exhibition documentation choice: the light from the street overpowers the gallery's, which, generally, we avoid. The gallery's lighting should be all encompasing, powerful, a scour to impurities. That this exhibition takes as its theme the shop window makes the reversal make sense, the gallery becomes a sort of inverse shop window itself. Which it always was. The fishtank of the street. But it's an interesting way of framing object which take the commodic display as their penchant. The Musee d'Orsay lights paintings with square spots fit to the paintings to make them appear as if the paintings themselves emit the light. It's important to know from where your light come.

Josephine Halvorson at Sikkema Jenkins

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The fourth wall's plane, the painting, that's always foreboding in Halvorsen's is literalized here in the NO TRESPASSING sign which, as the PR mentions, "the painting metaphorically extends the boundary line" i.e for all representational painting's ostensible window-into-ness it's still a wall we're racking our brains bashing our heads against. Mark Tansey's "A Short History of Modernist painting" comes to mind, or taking the measure of Plimack Mangold, the point being this will never not be fun, placing the sticker on the glass to make the window itself visible. It's difficult to see the painting for its frame, the image as its pixels, the words as its collection of letterforms, the painting is the barrier, making a better door than a window as it were, check out my paint.  Paintings aren't culturally valued for their ability to represent, we have images to do that for us, but a signifiers of "painting" - that most symbolically loaded cultural form - and so its important to highlight your brushstrokes, your smears, the act of making it. Gerhard Richter's dragged abstractions sell for way more than the illusions.