Claude Rutault at Federico Vavassori

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"two canvasses mounted on stretchers, of identical size and shape, painted the same colour as the wall on which they hang,"

Rutault, as if painting were some side project of interior design. An object springing from walls, architecture's mushroom. Whether or not this is true, the thought is better. You don't have to think about Painting, instead you get to think of air. You get to think of a painting that serves something else. It is pleasant to watch painting be useless like this. 

Raphaela Simon at Oldenburger Kunstverein

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Like that adolescent obsession with Tim Burton, the dripping red and wimpy skeletons, there's interest in so clearly -earnestly- wearing your heart on the sleeve. What could it mean, doodling myself in cage? Only a Freudian could answer to such riddles. Mystery is beside the point to the teen whose angst seeks symbol, to the painter who parades it. Being blatant is its own pathos. Directness. Guston's bowl of cherries, or Cahn's color indicating pain. It's hard to be mean to someone handing you their painfully naive heart. These are stop signs for it. 

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Surface so much surface. Skim coat it. Plating like gold the content. Thin but meaningful? This is the paradox of art's closing the door and everyone knowing it is still, sigh, just another window. The closed door already contains the content of the world. Eventually you come to love doors being closed. Appreciate candy for its wrapper. Only the shallow don't judge by appearance. In the stage of art, it doesn't matter if actor's jewelry is costume. It's all real surface. That's interesting. 

Sibylle Ruppert at Project Native Informant

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We've run out of Giger works to flip so we dig a little further into the basement. A better basement perhaps. Less interested in the surface displays of a HD leathery seduction - than the intermittent potions of past styles, the Ernst, the Moreau, her Giger friend, into some flavor more disgusting than its parts. Hans Bellmer with better graphics, a better refresh rate. Giger had the the good luck to have his monster trophy become icon. These are more acid to dissolve the past into a possible formula. The formula is what most are searching for today. But these have more fun than running the endless permutations, seem devious in the idea. And a ray tracing way ahead of its time. 

 Past: Christopher Williams 

"But [Williams'] en abyme of institutional/self reflection requires discerning the navel's tea leaves. Otherwise it's just tying up the institution in your ornate slick personal knots to look at your button. Otherwise it's just kink. "

"Williams' institutional mirroring... also simply multiplies and reiterates its institutional halos."

All: Christopher Williams 

Ruth Laskey at Altman Siegel

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A stitch denotes time, expenditure, so labor becomes a sweat condensing on its image, commitment to the geometric bit. You burn time to consecrate your image. Engrave it in the stone of labor. Lend time to meaning, to proof its beauty. 

"This separation of our social relations we've so completely assimilated that labor itself returns as fetishism, stitches mark this labor, look compelling, can be brought out onto white walls, as aura, as artwork. Labor itself becomes auratic, the look of it. Simulacra. Because every cheap objects is an equal tapestry. The stitches in time are smoother, hidden. Hold up your child's plastic toy and feel another at its end." - Read full: Notes on Stitches

Amelie von Wulffen at Barbara Weiss

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The mud monster is real, is painting, boogeyman of the artworld, hiding on everyone's mind - it is the imago haunting art. "Painting is filled with horror, the calls coming from inside the house." Von Wulffen is drawing in the mud our repressed object. The diamond of painting remains in the rough. The best painters today, Euler, Eisenman, Churchman, von Wulffen, are cartoonists are heart. They are not in service to the church of painting. It's means to draw the world. In our mud of mirage. Painting is a stupid ghost to be haunted by, facet diamonds of. 

See too: Nicole Eisenman at Astrup Fearnley Museet, All Amelie von Wulffen