Merlin James at Chris Sharp Gallery

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James makes paintings that are difficult without resort to "bad painting." A distinction interesting since, for all "bad painting"'s ostensible antagonism to rational orders and anti-appeal, has become immensely commodified - the idiot savant nappies now become blue chip trading cards. Somehow the adults love trading diapers. Bad painting not so bad. The point: James's rejection is more obtuse, slow to reach the demands of consumable painting. Like Hans Hoffman, an intellect doomed to make terrible paintings. Or Joseph Albers always being terrible at color. James forever caroms off anything digestible. Elderstatesman to the Richard Aldriches working tangentially to canon's rutted path, instead an outer mud searched through, never really wiped clean. 

See too: Richard Aldrich

Adam Higgins at Chris Sharp Gallery

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Drip paintings as hyper realist memento mori? A salad days preserved for years, preserved by "photography's inherent embalm and morbidity." Argument: "But youth should be wasted, sloughed into bogs of our own autumns. Instead [salad's] preservation, feeling always like photography flexing its own ability to do so, holding its pearl while we are like strapped to dying animals, timers and all. Like Imhof's Faust, subjects are forced into becoming advertisements for themselves [for painting], for the thing they cannot hold onto but [art] gets to reap." So you get your big abstraction, at a slight remove, and the humility flies upon it. They're vanitas, all art temporary, your Pollock rots, attracts vermin. This will all spoil!  But only in representation. "Dutch vanitas were also a means for the wealthy to signal their humility through ostentatious displays of said humility." The joke is you get your cake and display a humble cake too. 

Tom Allen at Chris Sharp Gallery

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Don't tell me that brick wall isn't about to embroider a sphincter, navel, fistula between. Perfumed sexual flora otherwise soured on anus. Don't let them fool you, that's a butthole. A Google deep dream of. Pants opening reveal. Don't let them tell you otherwise, don't let them be coy, saying the asshole-like-an-opinion is in you, everyone's got one, this one is yours, abating ruined meaning, its not true, that is a butthole, next to a flora, next to an entrance, in an opening, a cleft of meaning, and I'm telling you yours is this.

Altoon Sultan Paintings at Chris Sharp Gallery

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I was told you have to see these in person, that they're on calfskin, that you're missing half of it, the dusty tempera, the supple egg. A shield against digital suck, prizing your IRL. The sensuous preserved from its extraction/production by image. Protected. It could feel a bit christian, chaste, the erotic guarding, what's not revealed. Which the compositions support, they are roadblocks, closed and hinting, like... O'Keeffe, but the pants stay on. Looking through the fence of your jeans, finding denim, seeking calfskin.

Emma McIntyre at Chris Sharp Gallery

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The lead at the eponymous, opening with, questions abound, is this an argument/ante/gambit for unambiguously pretty painting? Bogs of the saccharine, positively. Don't sleep on this.

The PR's first paragraph is more classical- appends only minor conceptual hedging: "lyrical recapitulations of the history of abstraction" (lyrical) or the more time honored "historical engagement." These are negligible clauses compared to our decades long cliche, of painters "investigating painting" "rehistoricizing painting" "avoiding-at-all-costs-saying-just-painting." And this PR uses no ironizing verb. Instead the second paragraph spends its juice, arguing "lack of allegiance" "refusal to be limited," "languages to be liberally borrowed from." Until finally, "her articulate frank and unfettered incidents of a body thinking on canvas" which translates almost perfectly to "just painting." In a Merleau-Ponty sorta way. Drips that aren't even ironic. This would all seem slight, so inconsequential, if it didn't feel like an opening readied for crowbars edge. The last line earns its dystopian threat, the window wrested open to the "new horizons in contemporary abstract painting." It may come flooding. An ocean blue strategy eventually coalesces an ocean red with.

See too: Joanne Greenbaum, Trevor Shimizu at Misako & Rosen, Tyler Vlahovich at Lulu and Marc Selwyn