Alex Becerra at Karma International

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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?

Past: Nicolas Ceccaldi

 

"the indulgence of style seems the point, the running theme throughout Ceccaldi's: oversaturation of 'content,' a new version of camp: 'ostentatious, exaggerated, affected, theatrical.'  It's an blanket you put on things to make them appear new. You put dark fairy wings on young children, attach biomorphic toy-parts to video cameras, remake Beethoven with the signs of the dungeon dweller, paint it black and turn it upside down and suddenly people react to the affect rather than any individual content"

"Identifying not with the joker, but the losers who paint pictures of the joker."

Read full: Nicolas Ceccaldi at Le Consortium, Nicolas Ceccaldi at Real Fine Arts, Anna Uddenberg and Nicolas Ceccaldi at MEGA Foundation, Nicolas Ceccaldi at Project Native Informant, Nicolas Ceccaldi at Mathew, Nicolas Ceccaldi at Meyer Kainer

Ishi Glinsky at UC Santa Barbara

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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 build something so big as a sign. 

See too: Ana Pellicer at House of Gaga, Amanda Ross-Ho

Evian Wenyi Zhang at Lulu

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The book page, the altar piece, the comic panel, cubism (ostensibly), Google Images, GUI space, the "F shape" web structure. Information design, every so often a new way of looking is invented, discovered.  The form creates the seeing, realigns the world. Not sure this is it, but it's a noble pursuit. 

Past: Laura Owens

"What hides behind the nicety is an insidiousness of attentional assault."

Past: Laura Owens at Capitain Petzel

Koichi Enomoto at Nonaka-Hill

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This on the other hand is the Pollockification of figuration. The splatter gun school of content. The drips become sign systems, limbs, etc. Painting is the flypaper of culture. Collects its surreal. All forced into the depth of an Ipad, or again, Beckman. Painting as your punk jacket assembled and stitched with the cultural buttons you find neat. 

Satoru Kurata at Tomio Koyama Gallery

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Most of today's wild wacky arm figuration is limbs as an excuse for some Pollock. An abstraction excused as the narrative it isn't. (Like we still haven't gotten past Schutz. Or Beckman.) But here the narrative structure is stupid simple, effective. The trick gives subjects autonomy, the minorest amount of agency. We see them seeing. Instead of just the painter. Which we still always are. But we get to forget that for a brief edenic moment. Momentarily vicarious.