Mona Filleul at Air de Paris

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During painting's 2020 surrealist phase there was a subgenre of turbo David Salle. Painting as "cultural flypaper" collecting reference stuck to its support, a miasma of cartoons/image/internet/whatever. The idea isn't bad. Painting, after all, is a tray to collect image/culture. The painter gives it a little swirl and voila, art. But bathrooms walls collect better. Graffiti sediments the unconscious at night. The irruption on the walls of a bedroom is seminal. Just stuff, often more interesting than art.

See too: Subgenres of surrealism, "the kids grown on cartoons have arrived and their childhoods have coincidentally, absurdly, become the accurate depictions of the way the world has begun to feel"

Minami Kobayashi at Bel Ami

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Bonnard, Vuillard, Rodin, Gaugin, complaining that we keep repeating this is like complaining that bouquets still contain lilies. Adrenalized paint, like flowers, never goes out of style. Who would complain about another bouquet, about playing the hit a second time? A Dining Room in the Country returns in a second hand store. Now vintage. Stretch that song to thirty minutes at the Fillmore. Replay it a hundred years. Revamp the band with younger painters. Think how much those dead heads stole from the east. It okays the return eternal to playing it again but livelier. 

Ulla von Brandenburg at Barakat Contemporary

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The vacancy that pervades, it's more understandable when the artist comes from scenography. They're supposed to lack subject. That emptiness you feel, that's art.

There was the briefest micro-genre of "theater art" - Otto-Knapp, Lutz-Kinoy, Okiishi, Mauss - for whom art leveraged its ostensible excuse/raison as painting-as-backdrop to make totally gentle paintings. Which went wayside when people just started making paintings again, no excuse needed. But the original "real-fake doors/paintings" may be Heimo Zobernig (also coming out of theater scenography)  - who made a stupider and therefore more menacing version, a truly fake art that by getting mixed into the real stuff presented a pretty scary question, until we decided it didn't matter, the art party needed its backdrop.

See too: "in the style of ancient plated mirrors, an object of vanity for the rich, giving them back exactly what was loved most, their surroundings, their homes, their empire and visage."

Greg Parma Smith at Museum im Bellpark

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The icon (the symbol, the chart, tarot) is inherently pointed. It is a sign. But a sign where signifier does not require a signified. The point is signification, not significance. This is the task of painting. To appear meaningful. To jewel hieroglyphs and pretend a rosetta stone. Parma Smith makes the jeweling obvious, arbitrary, faceting our semio-gemstones, painting, they are shells, empty, and yet it works. 


See too: "These are the painterly wreaths that halo meaning. Bestow objects a blessing. In a video game the object would hover and spin. In a novel, the detective would pull them from earth for a magnified look. The monolith us monkeys dance around, point at. They are the MacGuffin. The monolith only as meaningful as the plot/painting can ascribe it. The actual meaning is in this means to distribute meaning."

Chou Yu-Chenga at Kiang Malingue

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Embryonic seed inside the maternal gourd/womb, painted in Pantone color-of-the-year stained glass. Made for a baby's room. Or a designer Maternity Ward. Someone has to design the paintings for hospitals where surrogates roam. High end. Something a little more designer than glassed prints of yellow foliage and seaside homes. Something more hospitable. No need to be afraid of being nice.

See too: We find this wanton sensitivity almost unnerving in art, we fear the institutionalization of its form, the hospitalization of "sentiment." ; Pantone color of the year painting.

Sophie von Hellermann at Space K

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We don't give Laura Owens enough credit for accrediting candy as painting. For being the candy that painting is. No one is interested in the narratives, they're interested in paint. History is the framework that excuses its cotton candy rendition. Like a World War 2 movie whose entire purpose is to let Brad Pit kill nazis. We want to see cartoonish evil be triumphed. We want big juicy painting winning. We want cartoons, juicy. 

see too: "The painterly requires an object for the brush to caress." "We want the painterly because this is painting's bright jewel - the more painterly it is the more undeniably painting it is, tautologically as symbol. In times of crisis we seek comfort in the familiar - put our money in what's safe. Is this why impressionism is coming back?"

Rachel Harrison at Greene Naftali

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Always thought the Harrison crust blobs were symbolic shorthand for "sculpture." Their lumps confused authentic and a stand-in for it, like a movie prop modernism. And collected detritus like a provisional gum. They were too stupid to be real, too caveman to be serious. But eventually the movie prop becomes real, or tries to, and we're left considering it. Which may be the eventual resurgence of interest in Harrison, when we stand to think all the fake art we are being forced to consider. 

see too: The hipster too was a semio-naut; whose careful balance of fashion’s signs were an additive and appropriative construction of appearance and identity, a careful facade of references, and so the concurrent rise of Rachel Harrison [with the hipster] makes symptomatic sense