Kiki Smith at Krakow Witkin Gallery

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Kiki Smith used to be an oddball. Her figurative allegorical fit askew into a more cerebral artworld. Like a wolf girl in high society. (As evidence of her outsider, for a career spanning decades this is only her 3rd exhibition featured on CAD.) That was then. This is now good measure to how far we've come. Smith looks like art today, the edge is removed. Would the Gilmore Girls scene work as well now witchiness is basic and wolf girls are welcomed with litter boxes. Mycelium network memes spread onto t-shirts. Being birthed by a woodland furry isn't unheard of. The suburbs are full of allegory.

Luigi Zuccheri at Etablissement d’en face

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Like Gertrude Abercrombie, Morandi, Forest Bess, a scratching attempt to unlock some symbolic object, these weird closet painters. Not asked to believe in symbols but in paintings power to consecrate them. A fish is just a fish and in the words of Nauman we should leave the fish alone but these fish are deviously painted enough to make me believe in something else.


See too: "The last 500 years of western painting had been dedicated to championing meaning from god given gilt. We, finding god dead, erased from painting, find ourselves symbolically bereft, attempting to arranging the secular remains into something telling. ... Isolate and excise the background noise, find our empty environs, still trying to assemble objects that we could say matter."

"These are the painterly wreaths that halo meaning... 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 ...They are the MacGuffin. The monolith only as meaningful as the plot/painting can ascribe it. The actual meaning is in [art's] means to distribute meaning[significance]."

Machteld Rullens at Andrew Kreps & PAGE (NYC)

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Cardboard is the flesh the monster uses to distribute its egg. Through the tunnels of a mechanized network the paper greases transit, a soft sheath. The flesh sloughs and becomes waste. Waste is our problem. Too much, barely recycled. Waste becomes anxious substance. We need to "deal with." The artist does what the artist does. Transform anxiety by stapling it to wall. Adhering it to our landscape. Outside the streets glut with substance, a baleful amazon. So we deleted the windows in place of virtual white, stood in for with an artists rendition of old winter. A soft parasite.

Miranda Fengyuan Zhang at Capsule Shanghai

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Glenn Gould, The Little Mermaid, bubbles, hands, fish tails, feet - painting as an interface, a series of icons hyperlinking content. Stitching a resemblance to primitive graphic user interface. Hover the hand, click the link to access the text. The Byzantine icon is a terminal to god, a shaman's press release. Painting today.

Seth Price at Galerie Gisela Capitain

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Technologies alter reality is truism so true it becomes unthinkable. Price: "Meaning is a technology invented by writing." Ripple effects and, Us, a fish who cannot see water. The map invents territory. Meaning invents shamans, invents art. Painting invents heavens, perspective, invented the afterlife of your image. Painting invented the first user interface. Google Images invents Dispersion. Is this why Price is always noodling in new image tech? Searching for the printing/painting method that will finally rearrange painting if not us. It would seem futile if 100 years ago inventing flatness hadn't rearranged art totally, my god. The painting interface had invented an anti-skeuomorphism. Now Price maybe inventing some Sci-fi style floating keyboard. But visions for the future comically misalign with the banality of what takes place. Looking out into the heavens of virtual reality is impotent to our necks craned down to a stupid black mirror in hand. UI is more powerful than storytelling, than meaning, than art. Like our demise at a climate crisis, it will be less flashy, rearranging our maps will be banal. In the meantime painting will be great fantasy of meaning's user experience.  

See too: "...Has Price gone 'painting'? In hindsight despite all the technologic and cultural baggage, Price's containers were always forcing that enigma of painting into the vessels... Price's continuous plastering optical illusions on. ,,,Which here Price's fascination with images: the point being any sufficiently advanced imaging technology might be indistinguishable from painting's magic."

"... His long term subject and maybe Price's longterm point is proving that this is actually an axiom of art, left clutching ink resembling but not quite actualizing a human."

Group Show at Derosia

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Large time is measured in amounts of crust. The sedimentary layers of geologic time, the half-inches of coral bones measuring years. Everything being buried, so slowly it's concealed. The dust accumulating day-to-day unnoticeably until a high-shelf's gray suddenly disgusted, its slow burial in ash. We speed the process by our anthropogenic layering, the landfills ticked in eras of Christmas trends, a furby layer, the urban stratigraphy of asphalt to roman roads. Dust Breeding. Moyra Davey, Walead Beshty, artists accumulating patina. A slower landfill, a glitter of entropy: divorce. Everything accumulates a dark, the dust to which we will return. This is the promise, more crud, marked by our artists' endless sunsetting.

LaKela Brown at 105 Henry

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Treating our cultural symbols as fossils is a refreshingly honest take. This is what art does today. Imports culture to play anthropology. You sediment facts, say the "amount of money that would have averted a 12 year old's death," as a skeletal relic, a specimen, into painting. So art can play forensic insight. This is how the artworld "deals" with the world, how it allows the world into the museum, the world it wants to talk about but can't without the permission slip of painting. If there's critique here it's in the artist being forced to perform "a harvest" of themselves for the altar of art, being made willing and complicit to do so, for the blue haired vampires demanding cultural sacrifice in totems, dystopian trophies for the wall.

See too:  "...inventories of our blossoming desires ... bleaching like coral reefs whose left white skeletons trace a once thriving culture... a ghost of taxonomic fossils remaining, held for the assessment of all the dreams of a life embedded."