Manuel Solano at Carlos/Ishikawa

(link)

The blind painter, it's like a Borges story, we see the creation the creator cannot. The preloaded failure in communication, the age old question whether the tree in my mind is the tree in yours. Why was it important for culture to keep dinosaurs lizard like - we were afraid of boys constricted by feather boas? Puffs with teeth underneath? If these dinosaurs are flamboyant then Jurassic Park's are alt-right. We're not even sure we're looking at the same thing. Different trees.

Issy Wood at Carlos/Ishikawa

(link)

Lost in the glass of virtualization, surface itself become artifact. Becomes the valuable relic. Do you get it? Touch is lost, becomes pornography, feeling through image. It makes sense, Wood, a cataloger of surface matte, already a year ago described with phrases like, "rising" "growing rapidly" "up-and-coming talent" while these things plummet - we want what is lost, or more importantly, about to be. Nostalgia for the current. 

Also lol at the model standing 6 inches from the wall.

See too: Matte Representation

Darkened Rooms, their couches

(Top, Center, Bottom)

It's nice on these hot days, to have all these promotional images of dark rooms, to keep our brains cool. The couch becomes the main signifier. We're going to start a collection of these, send in your own finds. Which will you choose? What does your couch say about you?

Marie Angeletti at Carlos/Ishikawa

(link)

Seduction, eroticism, through glass. What a time for it. Pornography is sex through glass, like our isolation, like our galleries, please remain six feet away from the
Both pornography and art must find visual means to sensate through this barrier. So you adopt its methods. Live through the window of her, ordering distant contact online. This is our prophylactic erotics.

Oscar Murillo at Carlos/Ishikawa

(link)

There's never been anything particularly subtle about Murillo's work. It's hulking metaphors writ in barn door sizes. A grandiosity that shadows whatever the work is "about," allowing a fleetingness, an evasiveness. Let's ask 12 people what Murillo's work is "about." What does a painting that says "Leche" mean? Or "coconut water"? "Maiz." "Yoga." The words function like fish hooks: something perhaps about class, but necessarily what about class. A few more in in this exhibition: Dirty bundles of bread and concrete. Black Vultures eating the black carcass of a black dog hidden under black tarp. Peformance, another tarp covering a body on the street shown in headlights is painted on by the artist. The arrows are huge, blinking, blinding, cover for what you want it to be about aboutness.

Bendt Eyckermans at Carlos/Ishikawa

(link)

"the kids grown on cartoons have arrived and their childhoods have coincidentally, absurdly, become the accurate depictions of the way the world has begun to feel"

Dramatic like theater kids, and a light that is. Like maybe a few others, Keegan Monaghan or Gijs Milius etc., the pathos found in the real rendered as leather, our substance as a mistake. The joke perhaps that surely we are not made of mere goo, able to be "abstracted" as gore, stretched as idiots, bodies like foibles. This would, if true, if we are accurate as cartoons, identify with such, be eternally sad. Eyckermans' seems to be that closer it can vacillate between positions of "realness" and "melodramatic goo" (El Greco as comedy) the more we might feel to physically identify with such absurdity. A line between drama and stupidity that is the world currently, and so paintings to realize it.


see too: Gijs Milius at Gaudel de Stampa

Stuart Middleton at Carlos/Ishikawa

(link)

Which like metaphor for the wrangling of the image, of forcing it out, Middleton's investment in manhandling the image, often laborious, stop motion, animations, of banal, finger-tapping, plain scenarios, extinguishing cigarettes in piss, show effort, weird flex but okay, hauled off to market, labor, means, a beautiful cow. What is a cow but a technology for meat production, surely kin to art.


Cow too: Wilfredo Prieto at NoguerasBlanchard, Aleksandra Domanović at Tanya Leighton