Masaya Chiba at Bel Ami

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Display being a function of reproduction, education. Masaya Chiba's always something pedagogically askew - like there's a presentation happening, there's some thing scientifically flat about the work - illustrative - but without information's answer. They seem to imply some big red arrow that would point out meaning, but lacking it instead presents that interminable inkblot question, 

see too: Masaya Chiba at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery

Chadwick Rantanen at Bel Ami

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".. collected images of the cross. ...Rantanen removes the cruciform’s transom or horizontal beam, reducing it to a simple column. The subtle alterations are surgical...  grafting and stitching to restore ...."

At first was thinking circumcision, but realized: it's tearing off the wings a butterfly, removing the potential of resurrection/metamorphosis - returning the butterfly to its immanent flightless body, a grub, snivelling across surface. Witnesses say "flee from idolatry ...  Because there is one loaf, we, although many, are one body, for we are all partaking of that one loaf." No transcendence. A staircase to nowhere, here.

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. 

Ben Sakoguchi at Bel Ami

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A sort of psychosis on canvas. The cultural litter accumulated/arranged as signage for the horror -  billboards welcoming the not-so-golden state of culture. This is not the surrealism of painting, but the irruption of a cultural repression. (This is a big difference, as types of surrealism go.) Like comedy is a system that reorganizes culture- rerouting it to a laughter - like Pope.L there's no relief of a joke complete, instead reorganizing culture for pain, an organized crime rearranging legs to prove them capable of breaking.

See too: Pope.L

Scott Benzel at Bel Ami

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Art's shared aspects with games manifested in tableaus. Think 3 Standard Stoppages: the arbitrary and the meaningful and the arbitrary-made-meaningful. This with all sorts of correlations to art. On Kawara's One Million Years versus here's dice roll over a Million Random Digits. You could write a paper on both books' similarities and differences . Thus art becomes the casino of picking digits, making meaning, manufacturing rarity.

Benjamin Reiss at Bel Ami

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Faced with what we don't understand our minds are adept at inventing stories, we see forests and invent gods. Under the hood a ghost, in darkness monsters. Art has never invented a fully functioning four cylinder engine or successfully refined petroleum, that is the space of industry, technology, science. Art's greatest technology was fancy dirts mixed in oil expelled from seeds crushed by hand and kept in pigs bladders for 500 years until someone finally invented a tube. If art has designed anything as complicated as an engine it is the turgidity of language used to scaffold certain canvases upright, our hot air the internal combustion keeping the whole thing running. Reiss's fantasies replace the complex systems with a cartoon which would seem sillier if they didn't mimic the diagrams doctors are using to perform heart surgery on your uncle. The diagram has always been a sort of slapstick on the notion of understanding or knowledge, the elision of certain nuances for clarity, vagueness removed and its hole filled with thick bright color. "our limited capacity to understand, or even the failure of understanding." In the margins of Leonardo DaVinci's study of a fetus, a note to himself: "Ask Biagino Crivelli's wife how the capon rears and hatches the eggs of hens when he is unplucked."


See too: Yngve Holen at Fine Arts, Sydney, Albert Herter at Koenig & Clinton,

Joseph Holtzman at Bel Ami

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"After all, style—clothing, curtains, the smell of someone’s body, a social circle, a painterly movement—requires a material subject, someone with an instinct for impressions. [...] a close investigation of the details that make up a body, and the surfaces and the colors, which inform its moods, instincts, and mannerisms. Style, ventriloquized through painting, drives the show home." - pr

We're trying to rescue "style" away from its pejorative kidnapping by the schools of it. That, apart from an individual's subscription to a genre of style, (bauhaus, hipster, monderist, minimalist, bobo chic, et al), style is an individual's outward expression of a subjectivity, even the unfashionable, plain, manifest "style": did conceptual art not dress itself in the style of bureaucracy.  This distinction is clear in Holtzmann's interior design magazine which inverted the "shelter magazine" template, no longer publishing authority its readers were meant to subscribe to and replicate in their own homes, but rather a document of other's own idiosyncratic expression, famously documenting a diaper fetishist's personal crib. The more or less latent sexual desire that sediments as objects, homes, and design, having a lot to do with art. And so if the pr is seeming quick to defense of Holtzman's pizzazz, its because the most of us have confused flourish as "style" and thus puerile, and not as the grave expression of our own internals, painted on marble, and heavy, like flesh laid over bone.

see too: Stewart Uoo at 47 Canal