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. 

Past: Mark McKnight

"The asinine quantity of pictures of bodies today, instagram influencers, lotion advertising, pornography. The vast amount of flesh smeared on everything, our stores full of them, our faces spread at 10 meter heights. Everywhere; a hall of mirrors. ... And our bodies become so extracted, mined, and repackaged, that we start to feel like we don't have bodies at all. Just things, mocked as meat space, something stupid or without sense, or heat, or passion, or sensitivity, but whitened teeth smiles mined. And but then here a photo of a body still surprising, that can endear us to it, these weird incongruous things not yet fully extracted."

See: “Automatic Door” at Park View / Paul Soto

Past: Michaela Eichwald

"make true atrociousness palatable, fecal umbers into gastro-figuratives of the stomach churning they induce..."" poured onto pleather paint flourishes implication: painters are smearing their own oily expelleds." "Like graffiti's intestinal signatures defecating their authorial. ... you're still reminded of your bowel held waste, the brown rope tethering us to earth that Eichwald seems to consistently paint."

"Eichwald threatens actual excess, dribbles that could still stain, or, like graffiti, are already stained, vandalized. Which Eichwald's do feel, vandalized - graffiti's defecated signatures - that pink one scratched into with like a school desk's attempted Baphomet that comes out more as a hairy devil with tits, not really satanic at all. 

"Because the acne poxed kid's hard desire for satanism outshines his ability to actually conjure it. This is endearing. And there's a joke in here about teenage bedsheets too, but both failed satan and besotted sheets are of that teenage libidinal excess that has a tendency to spill, run over, an excess energies that stain things..."


Click for full: Michaela Eichwald at Silberkuppe, Michaela Eichwald at Maureen Paley, Michaela Eichwald at dépendance

Past: Zak Prekop

"The preponderance of overly tasteful paintings today is, in one sense, critically justified through its “reexamination” of modernism, particularly looking towards the forgotten’s more decorative tendencies, Delauney, Munch, Jawlensky, Hantai...."

"... impressionist attempts at revealing painting's construction that Prekop turns into a game, all the jazz hands of "how's it made." It’s easy to say what is good about these. There's a level of illusionism defeating their ostensible lineage - abstraction's - matter-of-factness. We have a trust in abstraction that it isn't attempting to "hide" anything from us, its paint merely there, that these utilize against us as bait. Set the parameters and run. To mess the usual temporal signifiers of painting ... Flat Cubism. Painting as the interesting display of its information ... interesting conditions."


Past: Zak Prekop at Shane Campbell, Zak Prekop at Essex Street

Past: Jim Shaw

"... the myths of a culture embedded in the juxtaposition of subjects, making us each an interpreter of dreams.. there’s an implicit premise of speaking truth, reveal the latent subject..."

"... there was nothing worse than having someone telling you their dreams, [the dreamer] could say anything, conjure or erase any detail, that the dream only mattered if you invested enough to interpret its event in the psyche of the dreamer ... And trust the honesty of their manifestation enough to let slip some detail telling. A lot of work for occasional reward. The analysand preconceives the analysis coming.."

"The surrealism of today's painting mirrors the fact that any, in quantities vast enough, begins plotting points of the cultural unconscious. If you amass enough hand made images you begin so see dreams emerge. Painting, a virtual box that you fill with what you desire..."

"painting collecting, like flypaper, a civilization's subconscious."

Full: “Unexchangable” at Wiels, Jim Shaw at Metro Pictures, Jim Shaw at New Museum, Jim Shaw at Metro Pictures

Brook Hsu at Manual Arts

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"In dark forests we imagine predators, in trees see gods. We excel in confusion at inventing gods, or meaning." Critics appear in screens to talk against it. Their babble is the nightlight against unknowing, provide meaning to the void, the loss, the space of art. To feel some comfort against darkness. Explain it.

Ben Sakoguchi at Bel Ami

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A sort of psychosis on canvas. The cultural litter accumulated/arranged as signage for the horror -  billboards welcoming the not-so-golden state of culture. This is not the surrealism of painting, but the irruption of a cultural repression. (This is a big difference, as types of surrealism go.) Like comedy is a system that reorganizes culture- rerouting it to a laughter - like Pope.L there's no relief of a joke complete, instead reorganizing culture for pain, an organized crime rearranging legs to prove them capable of breaking.

See too: Pope.L