Friday, June 28, 2019

Miltos Manetas at Éric Hussenot


(link)

Which normally, or recently, nostalgia in painting is pureed and spilled onto canvas as artist's childhood's uncanny. But this is straight nostalgia. And unsure what place nostalgia has in painting, a medium whose relation to time is already paradoxical. Painting seems preloaded to become nostalgia, so sprinkling it with it seems redundant. Tuymans got away with by painting threat of destruction within it, nostalgia as sickness. Katz got away with it by the opposite, threatening to turn it into monument-commodity, all those faces threatening subject-loss turned to stone iconicity.  These, even without the 64 and RCA, even when people, are Luc Tuymans meet Alex Katz, placing nostalgia into nostalgia. Redundant. What happens when no one remembers RCA cables and these become nostalgia over something that to begin with barely existed. Which presumes some type of permanence to the painting. Which we can't.