Past: Jill Mulleady

"Painting is its ghost - not so much has cultural baggage as is cultural baggage. A history paintings stir reflections on its surface. And you see something in it."

"... using your memory of history's painting against you. These paintings feel like being gaslit: isn't that what's his name in new colors? No, these are entirely new paintings. History flows through the bejeweled eye of the beholder's digestive endpoint, already chewed and expelled for us."

Jill Mulleady at Galerie Neu, Jill Mulleady at Gladstone Gallery

 Past: Christopher Williams 

"But [Williams'] en abyme of institutional/self reflection requires an outside party to discern the navel's tea leaves. Otherwise it's just tying up the institution in your ornate slick personal knots to look at your button. Otherwise it's just kink. "

"Williams' institutional mirroring... also simply multiplies and reiterates its institutional halos."

"MoMA finally succumbing to mass incarcerating tourists  ... hard to see the decades’ work or installation subtlety amongst the brambles of families asking themselves aloud, literally “When do we get to see Matisse?” the Frenchman whose tickets are timed before you can even get in line and so the Williams show acts as a sort of slumbering-area for the masses ...The punchline to this whole joke, is that there is no punchline at all, the wall texts have been eliminated..."

"Commuting in the same deception, that no amount of looking will explain the object/image, they are representations, deferring elsewhere, and never conceding what lay beneath."

All: Christopher Williams 

Bas Jan Ader at Meliksetian | Briggs, Los Angeles

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Funny or sad? or a sort of funny sad, conflicted feelings, "a literary genre that blends aspects of both tragic and comic forms" - like surely he's not actually going to get into that boat.. oh. huh. Wait, what? No.

Hannah Levy at Arts Club of Chicago

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Surreal lush: plethorize association, fertilize until green abundance overflows, and we can't contain our reference. "It's risky, committing language to such ambiguousness, you sound like a perv while the tight-lipped get doubt's benefit. The words [will] assign more meaning to us than the sculptures which reflect them." The planet manifests unconscious what the spacemen would prefer closeted, our dead relations reappear. "We don't need other worlds. We need a mirror." - seems Lem's critique for conjured aliens. And between the poles of sentient-planet-surface-island-fantasy and mirror not sure where these lay. Somewhere like Matthew Barney chromed Louise Bourgeois. 

See too: Ron Nagle at Modern Art, Nairy Baghramian at Museo Tamayo

Michaela Eichwald atKunsthalle Basel

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What is a couch but an innuendo for a body? Suggesting its shape and therefore resembling its function, a loaf. 

Past: Michaela Eichwald

"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..."

"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."

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

 Past: Martin Wong & Aaron Gilbert at P.P.O.W

"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."

Full: Martin Wong & Aaron Gilbert at P.P.O.W