Allison Katz at dépendance

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Painterly "style" is the sediment of an individual's subjectivity accumulating in the granules of their decisions eventually garnering a pile: identity. Look through the glass of another's eyes to see their world through them. We - despite all - trust art to tell us something about its subject. But growing a diaspora of signifiers accumulates a puzzle, a representation adverse to coalescing identity.  Delays coherence in its subject, and creates an anxiety in our trust for the text to tell us something. The actual meaning is in this means to distribute meaning. Fails to deliver on its promise of arriving a destination. To make it feel like there may be some. Content is the red herring. Questions are Frankensteinian death-in-life of art. The game of Clue that never ends.

Allison Katz at Camden Arts Centre

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"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!

“Splendor Solis” at The Approach

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There's a sort of funny documentation choice, Bosmans' paintings in one photo are in the next photoshop erased to leave the wall behind them, the light doesn't change. It's a small decision mildly touching on the artificiality of our cartoon conditions, reality able to be distressed, bent, stretched. The slow feeling of vertigo and stretch, a malleability we all permanently live under and probably why cartoons blitz across art as the world begins to feel more like them, and we look for things representative of it. Even if the paintings were actually physically moved, it would have taken less time to have been done in "post," after, do things to a moment after it has taken place.

Allison Katz at MIT List Visual Arts Center

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the two subjects to painting, the thing represented in paint and the artist-as-subject rendering both. Painterly "style" is the sediment of an individual's subjectivity accumulating in the granules of their decisions eventually garnering a pile: identity. Look through the glass of another's eyes to see their world through them. We - despite all - trust art to tell us something about subject, and Katz's "self-portraits" make this mirror between painter and self-subject anxious by threatening this trust: painting that feel like fibs, competing styles that delay any coherence in its subject, the painter, our trust for the text to tell us something about the author. Others have called them palindromic or Janus-like, expressing this anxiety over the mirror. An irritant in our lenses, the paintings.


Leidy Churchman at Koelnischer Kunstverein,

Fredrik Værslev at Bergen Kunsthall

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Continuously amazing, Josh Smith's ability to produce a tasteful painting today. And Værslev too an incommensurate tastifying of painting identities smoothed and well worn into comfort: the softness of acid-washed history, whose untreated denim is stiff, abrasive, and has edges that Værslev happily washes away, with the already pre-distressed historical material. Gerberian friend support is made as a kind of joke, of painting "off-the-shelf," readymade and there's a story Værslev tells in interviews, of the shelf origin in which in his final moments at the Städelschule, and tormented years since his last paintings -"for three years and a half I did not paint, not a single drop of paint" - and encouraged heavily by professor de Rooij, he makes a painting to his (Værslev's) mother's specifications: useful and pink with a shelf for her flowers to prevent stereo ruination and does so, paints the pink shelf with the flowers, and this success deemed by professor student and ostensibly mother seems an apt in describing its continuation today meeting demand for a market, giving the people what they want, a comfort.


See too: Fredrik Vaerslev at Centre d’Art Contemporain Passerelle

Allison Katz at Gio Marconi

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Painting a growing diaspora of signifiers accumulates a puzzle, symbol/icons that hyperlink a representation adverse to coalescing immediate overarching identity. The images’ unambiguousness made tense by that directness failing to deliver on its promise of arriving a destination. If seeing was once forgetting the name of the thing one sees, then the icon represents a gaping blindness.

See too:  Annette Kelm at Gio Marconi

Allison Katz at BFA Boatos



Yet another Painting Press acknowledging the persevering artist’s insistence of painting’s “possible field” in spite of its obsolescence. An irritating sentiment when one could instead irrigate the barren field, or harvest dirt, perhaps ground for pigments, however you want to use the metaphor before it changes to Painting is like an “overripe” fruit. Whatever painting is, its barren and unpalatable until you learn to like it. The acquired taste here is the awkward flat-footeded™ go-to in painting with meta-winking-nonsensical subject, a designer sensibility of outdated fashions, intentional international. I mean that Monkey painting is just awful, like something from a 70’s Tommy Bahama travel brochure, tiger-fur speedo on its way. A confabulation of sensibilities, cliches of 70’s colors in 90’s photoshop-neophism, everything lightly repugnant, repulsive, overwrought; Accruing a semblance of a thread through the passing motifs that surface, developing a topology, the adsoprtion of badpainting cop-out disaffection when you could ask the cops to leave, you’re an adult and this is your home, decorate it however.