Wednesday, March 30, 2022

Lub Poeem at Baader-Meinhof

(link)

Frames make the interface, UI, the UX of painting. That we interact with, are informed through. We look through frames through frames through glass, and glass. Institutional critique is merely the remarque on the passe-partout. En abyme. Like looking the wrong way through a telescope, near friends waving far way, the aperture widens, widens, making painting appear distant, embedded in so much UI, even this, these words' wreath, dear U.

Tuesday, March 29, 2022

Allison Katz at Camden Arts Centre

(link)

"A mystery! A mystery! Where can I lay meaning?"
 
"[Art] is a cultural structure such that its prize is "what it is about." ...  there is something to be unlocked, understood. There is something to be won. This is the belief. ... Painting begins to be prized not for painting but for this mystery. And a mystery, should it not spoil itself, cannot tell you its answer. A mystery instead must load its objects with intent, clues, an ambrosia of noir, an affect of meaning."

Content becomes the lure to questions. PR: "the viewer is compelled to seek out connecting lines running through the apparently disparate subject matter; associations, and conversations that must be imagined and elaborated in order to complete the circuit." But content is the red herring. Questions are Frankensteinian death-in-life of art. The actual meaning is in this means to distribute meaning. To make it feel like there may be some. A meaning-feeling metaphor that's apt to life. There may be none!

Sunday, March 27, 2022

Sergio Sarri at Fitzpatrick Gallery

(link)

so thoroughly of and beyond our moment. Information turned kaleidoscopic mirage, tortured on the rack of art. Things being their surfaces. A car commercial all at once.

Saturday, March 26, 2022

Past: Julien Ceccaldi

"what had been Ceccaldi's bright branding of commercial trinkets, hangbags, fashionable shirts, comics, has instead become a brand of art flexed, making art objects, like, rather than saleable commodities (hand)painted to retension their exchangeability as brand, these recent objects are painted onto to place signature on fungible blanks that painting has always been. Painting onto a handbag dug something out, into its own face as facade, rather than the brand saturation going on here, place your dots on a car for charity, placing your icon on everything, whatever franchising you can get. You can place your face on anything it turns out."
"I've never been a Disney Princess, but I have been a corpse."

Julien Ceccaldi at Jenny’sJulien Ceccaldi at LOMEXJulien Ceccaldi at Koelnischer Kunstverein

Friday, March 25, 2022

Sula Bermúdez-Silverman at Friends Indeed

(link)

the cultural detritus pressed into reverential windows. Let the light in. The highlighter attracts thought. The flypaper of civilization. Our cargo cult now building advanced architecture to prayer: please let this waste our world have meaning. 

See too: “Flat Neighbors” at Rachel Uffner“Breathing Through Skin” at Antenna Space“A Love Letter to a Nightmare” at PetzelDavid Lieske at MUMOKRachel Harrison at Whitney Museum

Thursday, March 24, 2022

Kennedy Morgan at Delaplane and Cushion Works


(link)

being a young lad looking at snowboard graphics and feeling something navel in the drawings sinuous metal hands. I hadn't yet seen Bellmer's liquid flesh. Or Giger's carapace sex. Ballard's cum drizzled chrome. Tactility is a strong force, bent and harnessed to express urges that only exist visually. Like Lozano's tool drawings for our more pornographically sensitive age. Through the glass of art we now conjure feeling. This is how pornography works. This is what Sontag argued against: "Pornography has a 'content' and is designed to make us connect (with disgust, desire) with content. It is a substitute for life. But art does not excite; or, if it does, the excitation is appeased, within the terms of the aesthetic experience." Current pornographic materialism indicates a shift in art; the overt identification with an object/image is useful means for accessing its viewer. Connected such that our higher faculties have no defenses against. This is not tasteful consideration at a distance but thrall of slumber, dreamed emissions, sick drawings.

see too: nagle MaterialphiliaRon Nagle at Modern Art

Wednesday, March 23, 2022

Karla Kaplun at House of Gaga

(link)

As predicted here, but our backing into the future has come incredibly fast, past Shimizu's waterlilies, Manet, Degas, now our regression accelerated to "eighteenth-century academicism and seventeenth-century Baroque." It was Gaga showing these in 2020, ahead of being behind. Towards the neo-win, the new renaissance. 

Tuesday, March 22, 2022

Samara Golden at Night Gallery

(link)

If you placed a Daniel Spoerri in a Kusama Infinity Room does it beco- whatever. I can't believe these things haven't exploded as the hot new lobby bait. Museums need a product to fill their atria, search for reflective, and thus inclusive, possibility. Wasn't the artist present also just a mirror? Occasionally leaking goo, guts. Golden is good at mirrors, there's no doubt about that. But maybe the thing about Golden mirrors is they never reflect us, we become vampires before the lobby of art, which is too apt a metaphor for museums.

See too: Attempts to reach out

Saturday, March 19, 2022

Sean Patrick Watters at Galerie Praz-Delavallade


(link)

We're in a strange moment where art and fashion photography are, at least temporarily in alignment, attempting the same ends, a representation of soul. This is particularly hard for anyone ambivalent to commercial desire as well as anyone distrustful of photography to actually display anything like an inner. There is a mysticism at root to both in a belief that the image is inherently capable. It is a fair acknowledgement to say the commercial world wields the great cultural club here, since it controls the beacon we all see through. At the same time we have Heji Shin big inkblots of Kanye West - and we know these say nothing about him. Photography is perhaps really only capable of editing its own mirage?

Friday, March 18, 2022

Past: Martin Soto Climent

"charcoal through panties, you would think these would be sexier than they are."
"The gesture given frame, cradle for its image, able to be sent, transacted.  The packaging lends a sentimentality, a hope for stasis, permanence, removed from the chaotic world into an order, like butterflies pinned to boards"

"enrapture of sensitivities, enwrapment, a container allowing movement, transaction. The Amazon box that allows its sales; cardboard a larger problem than the items it contains....  Shouldn't we be speaking more of wrapper than "content" ... enshrine odes to our hurt"

"the curve of inside into out, curving exterior into insides, an expression of explicit vulnerability distinct to the anthropomorphic... a faint pubescence of gender, objects just arriving at a split, a fork budding semblance of gender possibility, blushing blues and corpulent pinks.


Past: Martin Soto Climent at Michael Benevento & Yuji Agematsu at The Power StationMartín Soto Climent at Proyectos MonclovaMartín Soto Climent at DREIMartin Soto Climent at AtlantisMartín Soto Climent at Michael Benevento Gallery

Tuesday, March 15, 2022

Past: Lutz Bacher

 Every Bacher work is its tombstone, the thing which represents its end, the last person remembering their name.

The framing is contextually ambiguous ...  a viewers attempts to position themselves in relation to the subjects feels instead their meaning transpire and fade.

In "Entropy and the new Monuments" Smithson described his artistic cohorts' inadequacy in the grand scales of time and entropy, the culturally catatonic monuments in human "progression." The absurdity and nihilism of cosmic scales entering the personal ones, which Bacher recurringly recalls... cosmos xeroxed into the noise... spilled across expanses like baseballs or sprawls of sand ... Mountains dissolve in grains that resemble liquids in geologic time. This recurring theme. The biblical "for dust you are and to dust you will return" is, as far as we know, scientifically accurate.

Read Full:
Lutz Bacher at Galerie Buchholz and Sarah Rapson at Essex Street
Lutz Bacher at 3320 18th St
Lutz Bacher at Daniel Buchholz (3)
Lutz Bacher at 356 Mission
Lutz Bacher at Statens Museum for Kunst
Lutz Bacher at Daniel Buchholz (2)
Lutz Bacher at Daniel Buchholz (1)

Monday, March 14, 2022

New trend: forgetful surrealism

(Jeanette Mundt above)

New trend: forgetful surrealism, a sort of traumatized historical painting. Bleeding through. Your memory of painting clouded, convoluted themes. Less the vitamixed collage of say Juliano-Villani and more like Picabia with a head injury, amnesia allows the soap opera to continue again, repeat its plots in new ways. 

Artists include: Amelie von Wulffen

"almost like the history ... bruising into paintings. How images transact through time...  Our memory of Matisse is like seeing the past in bad dreams, crushed into the present. We have memory of how painting was, how history functioned, how impressionism was painted, but it's wrong, [historical] hangover, a painting full of malfunction, its shipment through time arrives damaged. The hematoma is fine."

"Painting is its ghost - not so much has cultural baggage as is cultural baggage. A history [these] 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."

See too: Amelie von Wulffen,

Jeanette Mundt at Overduin & Co.

...A relation to their subject is ambivalent despite their load. Mundt often targets content that is full of juice, yet is left on canvas to fall apart. A gap that reviewers seem unable to fill with their own: Travis Diehl seemed to conjure the process of glaucoma's blindnessTess Edmonson said about the film on which a painting was based: "the gallerist warned me not to watch it"; and Zoë Lescaze aptly called it "ready for viewers and critics to plot their opinions onto her body." Her body of work which fails to deliver on the subject.


Read full: Jeanette Mundt at Overduin & Co.

Friday, March 11, 2022

 Past: Tyler Vlahovich at Lulu and Marc Selwyn

"deftly avoiding any specific painting reference - not quite any particular - but being obviously loaded with it... Kaleidoscopes of image that sift though. They accumulate reference and abandon it, as if the abstraction of reality wasn't enough... abstracting the abstraction... our current phantasmagoria"

Full: Tyler Vlahovich at Lulu and Marc Selwyn

Johnny Pootoogook at Daniel Faria Gallery


(link)

Jesus. While painting decorates its subject, drawing is the schematic for its construction inside your head. Imagination, where the image blooms, your brain the fertile garden that grows what exactly is "The Rose."


Thursday, March 10, 2022

Kirsi Mikkola at Galerie Nagel Draxler

(link)

30 years before the future was female merchandised and Beyonce haloed herself a 30 foot font Feminist it seems Mikkola had already tensioned this feminism and commodification, the bronze Fearless Girls, and the activism of posture. There was apparently success. Then she left it. Which seems foreboding. Because as the PR states, "It's time for a new toy!"

See too: Andrea Bowers at Capitain Petzel

Wednesday, March 9, 2022

Caroline Mesquita at Blaffer Art Museum & Soshiro Matsubara at Bel Ami, Los Angeles


(Mesquita, Matsubara)

Today two theatrical sculpture exhibitions, itself remarkable, but further both detail two stories of women accosted by objects. We need a Freudian for what's in the air. Dreams and desire and uncanny dolls, in our white theaters, skulls projected. We need a doctor, and not just one who plays one on this screen. 

Tuesday, March 8, 2022

Past: Caroline Mesquita

"Giger for whom the mechanistic and biomorphic found waypoint in the skeleton, [...] the crabs and muscle cars who share the PVC fetishist's interest in shiny bulges; it wasn't hard a move to the erotic. ...we can anthropomorphize steel so long as it reflects our own curvature. 

"Suggesting an interiority. A beneath, the inside, indoors, the soft pink innards you imagine. An igloo is crunchy on the outside and chewy on the inside. "


full: Caroline Mesquita at T293Caroline Mesquita at Kunsthalle Lissabon

Monday, March 7, 2022

Louise Sartor at Crèvecoeur


It used to be that tapestries were the most valuable, we prized labor which each stitch proved, then genius was invented and we prized painting as its creative embodiment, value. Now painting fears replacement, desperately nails its aura to the wall. We spent 30 years whinging in big journals that painting was dead, or dying (or unnaturally resurrected braindead seeking brains, electrified by market) but what if what kills painting isn't the turgid laments of the cranially shined, but simply that it looks too much like the image in the age of its hyper-inflation, they start to look cheap. Defenses agains it: object and aura, but also, skill? Stay tuned.

Past: Louise Sartor at Le Consortium

"Painting is made rare and thus valuable for its support, its anchor to reality. ... So that support starts to hyperbolize, exaggerate. Placing stakes to claim existence, location tethering, against images lost on networks. Materiality claims an objecthood. Painters protecting their domain. "

Read full: Louise Sartor at Le Consortium

Saturday, March 5, 2022

Alice Neel at Xavier Hufkens

(link)

There is no more ecstatic comedy than Alice Neel painting a face like a car accident, all shrapnel and torqued metal, and borderline flesh hanging from crumpled undercarriage. Painting a mirror in the slow process of shattering. (Zoom in on brushwork better rendering shucked oysters than lips.) Neel is a master of angles that shouldn't human - instead the frog spawn abstraction of late Rembrandt. Faces are funny, a cruelty that Neel somehow doesn't make painful. Instead micro-events of painting blasted across and endeared to our gumlike faces. 

Wednesday, March 2, 2022

Stanley Whitney at Galerie Nordenhake


(link)

"sunsets [are] the near endless regurgitations of saccharine accident. Incidental returns on arbitrary conditions, each completely unique and endlessly the same. A triple-point of beauty, arbitrariness, meaning." Do sunsets mean? 

We want to see the human through the bars of its conditions, a contest of life whose winner grants freedom, acceptance. We prisoners who make art in attempt to prove we have souls. Live forever.

Past: Stanley Whitney at Karma

"Whitney toys with arbitrariness. Caroming off the totally indiscriminate to float in some nether zone of baroque frivolousness ... Opposing Gunther Forg's true flippancy."

Stanley Whitney at Karma

Past: Julia Rommel

"and so Rommel makes the object structurally flaunt itself, give paint a stage upon which to display itself, paint, stripped and naked before us"

"The overt material presence is at the same time the "accidental" means of composition, providing reason for the material to be there, i.e. they're artifacts of a process so we're not reading into the color field emotions of the capital P Painter (of say Marden, Diebenkorn, Rothko) but as the residuals of painting's means which provides relief from capital M Meaning (Parino, Hesse), the great relief of things just being, or trying their hardest to."

Tuesday, March 1, 2022

Josh Faught at The Wattis Institute

(link)

After the post-apocalypse of the sign, in the wasteland, we began picking up the rubble. We needed meaning, which was old, vintage, possible authentic. We started storing it in reliquaries, placing it in altars. Aura by the altarfull. The relics were asked to speak. We pressed fragments to foreheads and contemplated skulls. Which was a very old pastime. 

Rochelle Feinstein at WORLDWIDE

(Campoli PrestiFrancesca PiaNina Johnson, Bridget Donahue, Candice Madey, Hannah Hoffman )

Our powers combined we form, WORLDWIDE, the power of friendship.

We forget we enjoyed modernism, led by hand, school group, through Art's hallowed atria into the heart of painting, children learning to look up to it. Socially engineered by cadmium at scale. Our love for painting so ingrained that of course artists tortured it. Rooting the modernist corpse for one more magical rabbit of identity, a painting. The magic trick of Zobernig's corpse step - but there's less modernist meaning at stake than a painter's ability to renege on signature, identity, to evade it. This is so instead of recognizing a painting, we have the painful obligation to look at it. A painting as opposed to a signature. 

See too: Amy Sillman at Sikkema JenkinsJoanne Greenbaum at Crone