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

Matt Browning at Galerie Buchholz

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Modernism with a human touch. Hand whittled. But modernism is already dirtied. For all their high idealism the Mondrians are dirty, their line shakes slighty. Judds have fingerprints, blemishes. The stuff you're not supposed to notice. The stains that arrive from the artist's studio, that the archivist knows not what to do with. The "hands" of artist. Sometimes we want hands and sometimes we don't. The spills and the drips authorize the sugar sweet thing we call the authentic. Distill this authentic down and you get sludge. That might be too much hand, too much dirt, that might be craft. 

Hana Miletić at Magenta Plains

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Repairs recast in stitches. Labor of the working class remade with symbolic capital. Valorization of labor. A surplus value is generated. Interest of representation.

See too: This separation of our social relations we've so completely assimilated that labor itself returns as a literal fetishism

N. Dash at Mister Fahrenheit

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A turd. We're so removed from nature that dirt appears as aura, spread it becomes painting. Materials: earth. "Go touch grass." Buy a painting to look at the earth. Souvenirs of a world we used to touch. Eating dirt becomes auratic experience. I've seen Waterworld. In the post-apocalypse dirt becomes money. The point we're living in it.

See too: "the anthropological remains of our dissolving physical world, distributed like catalogs of our once sensual pleasure over digital networks, ... these are about the loss of that, mourning it, our desire to once again touch things again, like all those salvaged wood paneled Brooklyn bars..."

Anne Imhof at Galerie Buchholz

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This is the merch stand that subsidizes the concert. Like baseball cards having little to do with their stars hitting power, the people collect them anyway. A squiggle, the author's scrawl on paper, a gesticulation in architecture. This is abstract expressionism. Drip of the author. 

Nick Mauss at Emanuela Campoli

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The original frizz of architectural decor in its becoming-painting has seemed to have just become painting. But it's a mirror! Okay. A different substrate, a little looser. Like the wildfire aha of painted televisions, a new substrate ostensibly is new ground. Not really. But the reversal is comedy. Painters today don't start with a blank canvas, they start with collector-abstraction and work backwards. The gesture is obligated, the choice is what can hold it.

Lee Kit at Fridericianum

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But that's not a sunset, no, so much more, sentiment.

See too: Nostalgia suspends, in formaldehyde's rose tinted veil, our memories. Memories like fetal pigs. New research shows that nostalgia is the brain's way of combating negative feelings and nihilism, the brain self-administering drugs...

Oliver Osborne at Francis Irv

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Osborne doubling down on his matte representation, its dry scumbled until dusty. Yellow paint like grandma's, you need a Claritin for it. "[Richard] Prince's real joke is that the paintings keep telling the same joke for years and years stupidly." Our most famous sans-comedy. Repetition, run into the ground begets something else. A non. A fading. Dry humor to dust. Reboots? Maybe just lovely dust. A new nostalgia.

See too: "Artisanal Old-timey rendering, wrapping its cold surface in warm wool."

Nina Porter at Theta

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The mad scientist is driven to the fringes to invent something "against god." A monster. To surreptitiously photograph girls by the pool Tichý built a camera out of matchbooks and thread spools. An isolationist spy for his own perversion. A mad scientist's sympathetic intentions, desire, even if their methods are not. You can't take people's parts without asking. The doctor would have required permission from the health department for all that exhumation. That's why you need to build a suspicious backpack. To have a reason for all that gadgetry. Build a peephole into the lab. The voyeured corpse stolen from Étant donnés.

Kobby Adi at FELIX GAUDLITZ

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Conceptual art mutated into three genres, 1, zombie abstraction; 2, art legalese, say Cameron Rowland or Daren Bader/Martin Creed; and 3, myth attractors. The myth attractors best illustrated by Trisha Donnelly for whom stories circulate as much as image. But a definition might be provided by this description of Adi: "an idea extending beyond any material work, disseminated by hitching rides on the memories of those who have seen it, on the words of those who talk about it, or within the images and accounts that document, or merely suggest, its existence. Still, the label is not the artwork. Wherever there’s water, All splashing and pouring can appear—that’s the point." While Donnelly has gone on to arguably more formal work, the setup remains, this air of suggestibility, the ominous object whose explanatory reference points are cut at some specific level, until reference begin pointing everywhere, until the air becomes perfumed with it. The gap is the mystery, is its interpretability. These are instruments made of gut string inside heat resistant tubing, which, like the internal temperature of animals, you can hear the music already. It exists in the suspicion for it. Reminiscent of Michael E. Smith's clarinets inside PVC tubes - documentation of which seems vaporized along with Susan Hillbery's gallery and website. It's just myth now. But they sounded great.

See too: We feel comfort with the artwork identified and labeled, packaged by the camera or work list, catalogue raisonnéd. We appreciate butterflies pinned spread behind glass. Explained. Removed from the packaging artworks and butterflies disperse, cling everywhere, etherealize into suspicion for them.

David Douard at Galerie Chantal Crousel

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in comparison to the raw sewage spilling onto gallery floors today ( see: aspirated trash ), this seems from a moment ago, when we would arabesque our garbage, assemblage a baroque. Our Ornaments of trash. Douard's look like Matisse at this point. Maybe the water we swim is so full of waste that's its just water at this point. Simply the material we sculpt with now. Valerie Keane, Robert Bittenbender, but really it's all Genzken's fault. 

See too: Valerie Keane

Kayode Ojo at Maureen Paley

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2006? Carol Bove, Martin Boyce, Patrick Hill, Michaela Meise, et al. VVork-core. "All the chatter about a 'new formalism' going on." It was our "Fuck the Bauhaus" moment. They're all in Artforum several times. Everyone was repackaging, recompositionalizing, a minimalist modernism. Presenting tableaus of a wonkified high culture past, like bent Ikea showrooms of minimalism. Now it is a micro-era, quickly forgotten. But the procedures remain fun, merchant stands for selling something back to ourselves.

See too: Every 10 years assemblage reinvigorates itself as the dumpsters picked through are modernized to the current castoffs and appear new, the waste that evolves along culture until finally an artist is able to rummage up enough LEDs, acrylic panels and Arte Povera catalogs to accumulate the update to our Rauschenberg cardboard clogging the pipes of our forward progress.