Candy Jernigan at Wattis

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Artistic power to make something "appear," be visible, is often abused with a beatification or worse aestheticization of a subject the artist predicts will interest nobody without their, the artist's, supple grace, i.e. the stylization, photorealist iconizaton, or whatever painterly reifications for aura redundantly affixed. Of course drawing is recording and thus proof of its seeing, document to its witness, made visible, and more accurate lines authenticating, but the drawing need not be "special." Jerrigan's accumulation proves a more a serviceable method in which the painter yields to the object, representation of it and not talent. Like all those tacos and kebabs painted on stucco to advertise the real thing inside, there is a functionalism in vernacular foodstuffs that often feels like a relief. If you want to show something you just put it there.

Group Show at Greene Naftali

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How quickly this work has accumulated the look of the academic.  Possibly because it all went in hand with the theory that consumed it as their banner in its initial flourish it has as quickly dehydrated in the burning of its moments usefulness. Harrison’s dissonant abstraction, packaging the painter's studio schizo positioning of inside/out, its initial edge worn to the look of safety scissors in its childlike spoils. Or as recent as 2008 writers speaking of Krebber’s ability to “make us nervous” or in 2013 still describing his second 2003 Greene Naftali exhibition, “these works were if anything even more unfriendly to critics and collectors expecting a show of Important European Painting.”  Yet who today is really nervous about these text paintings. Surely for all the descriptive language of “evasion, deflection, deferral and refusal; diffidence, apprehension, ambivalence and doubt” and the sloganesque “preferring not to” Krebber’s greatest “evasion” was his willingness for absorption into those so willing have him, the conceptual disposability of a practice premised on the initial shock of the “evasion” in plain sites, readied for gallery’s recoup, to be making the most historically assailable paintings around. A horse on a wall as if mocking it all from behind the wall of the institution. The murderer dreaming not of the murder but of tacks placed on the map of the detective.