Mandla Reuter at Croy Nielsen

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When you start to look at exhibitions as a crimescene and art as its evidence - you can't unsee it. The art is the mystery. Which makes clues of everything. Clues lend aura. Aura is mistakable as art. The documentation plays up the murder mystery. The artwork placed in forensic baggies. This is a continuous vibe of art today - with its disparate elements array on floors.

Soshiro Matsubara at Croy Nielsen

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Unlike Khnopff's Caresses there's no nuzzling here and there is something decidedly unerotic about all of Matsubara's. Nothing really sexy about disjointed mannequins which like the scratchy paint conjure all the rugburn the recumbent will endure. Like Lutz Bacher oversized sexual assault doll, or Charles Ray's endlessly genitaliad figures, there's something about mannequin sex that doesn't sit right. Like a kiss without wet, like paintings scratched at, there's something sorta dehumanized about it, more like fish kissing or gasping. Highlighting the strange butt that looks more like a shelf.

Albert Mertz at Croy Nielsen

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Variations and permutations of style are the most bludgeoningly tiresome aspects of contemporary art; artists implanting their "subject" in mass produced canvases, themselves into little Fordist factories, producing the worst thing an artist can, a "series." Some finding "criticality" in an ironic exhaustion like Josh Smith or Ann Craven. Then the whole zombie painting deal. It leaves us exhausted for an artist like Mertz. It becomes hard to articulate a difference without rimshoting around some basket of the "authentic." Though he was before all that.

Birke Gorm at Croy Nielsen

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Materialize has become a word of extra meaning in art, a new process akin to electroplating, anodizing, or gilding. Artists "materialize" things like text into substance, into a material with weight, turd like figures, objects which feel material. Distinct from artistic objectification (which merely turns the virtual into the concrete to make it transactable), materialization is the patina of objectification, an excess. As if the content was inherent to the material object itself, as if it speaks.


see too: Materialphilia, Birke Gorm at Croy Nielsen (1)

Albert Mertz at Croy Nielsen

(link)

Perhaps stronger conceptual forebear than the Supports/Surfaces group to the likes of Dianna Molzan for whom Hainley gave the lovely description of "voguing their structure" i.e. striking the poses of painting, brandishing its look, flaunting itself, but perhaps "Deconstruction of the furnishing of painting" Mertz programmatic version -  "serv[ing] as an intellectual exercise, declining all conceivable cases of painterly possibilities, but lastly also becomes a physical exercise for the viewer since ‘the labour of the audience ought to be the same as that of the artist’" - best meets the definition given on Paris is Burning as "a kind of institutionalized showing-off."

Birke Gorm at Croy Nielsen

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Our rising desire for materiality in a world losing it manifests in fetish for increasingly grotesque versions. Coprogenics. "Author Donna Williams [...] points out that fecal smearing serve many real purposes that are often overlooked by caregivers and medical providers:
"Provides a sense of control over one’s body and environment when other areas of life are out of control
"Provides a sense of ownership over one’s actions
"Expresses feelings of anger, frustration, helplessness and powerlessness
"Prevents unwanted social interaction
"May be associated with other comforting emotional experiences
"May be part of a personal ritual that provides comfort
"May be part of an obsession that is spiraling out of control"

Nina Beier at Croy Nielsen

(link)

Moving from a visual virtuality to a dispersed cultural one, finding points to overlap as sculptural homophones: cultural cross points bringing their distance together like two ends of a blanket. All the points, listed neatly in the press release, converge here in the voluptuous ass as its breakthrough. You thankfully get to assemble the metaphors yourself, the spine of it: the venus's absorption into our cultural memory (like, the most latent image) surfacing in strange objects, objects that massage the asses they mimic. The vibrato chair's pleasure, or the rotund tourist thieving the paradisiacal pubis he cannot contain himself from taking, utlimately ruining his desire, what an ass.

These latent images precipitated by human desire, embedded into common objects, as anthropologically surreal manifestations of it continually becoming a more interesting aspect of today's surrealism resurge, strongly produced mostly by women. See too:


See too:  Nancy Lupo at Swiss Institute, Nancy Lupo at 1857, Nairy Baghramian at Marian Goodman, Katja Novitskova at Kunsthalle Lissabon, Klara Lidén, Alicia Frankovich at Kurator, Nina Beier at David Roberts Art Foundation,

Olga Balema at Croy Nielsen

(link)

Materially this work is weird, interesting, the taught over-inflated carcass of rotting whale PVC fetishists, dead fish washed ashore and sexually lurid, the hyperreal of the package holding the bodily abject, but the installation of it exemplifies today’s occult handling of spatial composition, the feng shui arrangements that bespeak an other, or a spiritual warmth, weirding, and there exists an interesting conversation between Gedi Sibony (arguable harbinger of current compositional resurgence, possibly even of the curtain meme) and Kai Althoff in which the former kinda sorta admits the latter. These compositional strategies become a signal, attempting through odd/unusual placement to valorize objects, in the same way higher powers once commanded painters into corners, sculpture today arranges on a logic established/predicated on an otherness. To quote Carpenter yesterday, “non- allegorically allegorical “displays” I seek to confound these products into a hieroglyph.”
But the work is desirable, expect to see more of it. Buy now as it were.


See too: Olga Balema, Anne de Vries at Michael Thibault , Michael E Smith at Susanne Hilberry, Merlin Carpenter at MD72, David Douard at Johan Berggren,  Sophie Nys at Crac Alsace, “Puddle, pothole, portal” at Sculpture Center

Mitchell Syrop at Croy Nielsen & Glenn Ligon at Regen Projects

(Croy Nielsen , Regen)

The artworld's relation to its signs can be confusing. Here one shouts its empty signs, a sound like empty metal struck, the other attempts to deplete its referent to nausea. Both a protest. Different relations to iconography. Both truisms, but of nowhere equal value. Cuffing these two exhibitions to each other to each eat the other, this is CAD at its curatorial finest.

see too : Mitchell Syrop at Midway Contemporary Art , John Baldessari at Marian Goodman