Sean Landers at Le Consortium

(link)

A joke can only be told so many time. "A joke is spent and exhausted. So an artwork - with its requisite implicit promise of eternalness - can't really make a joke without implying that it too will one day be depleted. [Richard] Prince's real joke is that the paintings keep telling the same joke for years and years stupidly." Like a painting. And Landers finds a similar interest in defeat, once the comedy is depleted you have reckon with what remains. Which, what remains?


See too: Sean Landers at Rodolphe Janssen, Sean Landers at Friedrich Petzel

Louise Sartor at Le Consortium

(link)

Images are worthless. Painting is made rare and thus valuable for its support, its anchor to reality. But the canvas was also intended to disappear behind the image. So that support starts to hyperbolize, exaggerate. Placing stakes to claim existence, location tethering, against images lost on networks. Materiality self-sites, claims an objecthood. Painters protecting their domain. "today’s painting, after all, has to contend with iPhone screens."

See too: Brian Calvin at Le Consortium, Oliver Osborne at Peles Empire (Matte Representation)

Nicolas Ceccaldi at Le Consortium

(link)

"Within the context of the present exhibition, the satanic motif exceeds the framework of occultism to become a kitsch allegory of artistic practice as professional activity."

Like LaVey's Satanism rebranding Randian Objectivism with dark panache for its target audience of misguided white kids, the indulgence of style seems the point, the running theme throughout Ceccaldi's: oversaturation of "content," a new version of camp: "ostentatious, exaggerated, affected, theatrical."  It's an blanket you put on things to make them appear new. You put dark fairy wings on young children, attach biomorphic toy-parts to video cameras, remake Beethoven with the signs of the dungeon dweller, paint it black and turn it upside down and suddenly people react to the affect rather than any individual content, which you can't see behind the hollow overlay.


See too : Nicolas Ceccaldi at Mathew

Alan Belcher at Le Consortium

(link)

Comedy empty, evacuating. Repeating the joke to semantic satiation, becomes nonsensical, hysterical, until you're screeching, the words pouring out as concrete objects before you, it's tiring.

"As an independent Canadian artist, it is of interest to note that Alan Belcher’s work is not subsidized. Belcher continues to decidedly never apply for (or receive) grants from (or participate in juries of) any municipal, provincial, or federal arts councils in Canada."

Wade Guyton at Academie Conti & Le Consortium

(Academie Conti, Le Consortium)

Print the painting, how cold and deliciously malevolent it all seemed at the time until our own body temperature fell so low to match it that eventually even Scheljdahl felt warm towards a retrospective of them. Everyone stressed endlessly the physicality of them, that poor ol' Guyton had to actually tug them out of the printer, that it was tough work, a little sweat, a little body heat, not absolute zero, but this extraction only served to underscore the fantasy of the creative act soon able to be stretched out from digital ethers like raw id tugged from digital subconscious, and erect in a gallery. That we could lose our hands in the printing press because soon our wet desire would just print itself as diamonds on a wall, we could stop tugging them off in studios, and the Onanist accident of its spills and smears prevented reproduction, the accident made them unreproducible, sterile.
But now 2016 in the era of Atkinsian avatar-conciousness, and Rachel Rosist digital semio-corruption we understand that the digital was just a new pool to self-reflect in, and we're still looking into it wanking. Look a Guyton self-portrait appears up in it.


See too: Zak Prekop at Shane Campbell, Cheyney Thompson at Raucci/Santamaria, Daniel Lefcourt at Blum & Poe

AR: Willem de Rooij at Le Consortium

Click here to read

Originally Posted: September 23rd, 2015

Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

Brian Calvin at Le Consortium

(link)

Is the ubiquity of installation views today (over the very obsolete taste for images of the paintings cropped of which here there are presented none) merely today's fashion, or is it a use of its authority. Wasting space is form of symbolic violence, of power, and the empty whiteness surrounding paintings today is the latent frame replacing yesteryear gilt to showcase its images held in power and wealth, the symbolic wealth of the museum, or the hundreds of dollars per square foot of galleries, that any gold leaf would be understood to be redundant.


See too:
Sophie Nys at Crac Alsace, Florian Hecker & John McCracken at Künstlerhaus KM- , Midway Contemporary Art, Lois Weinberger at Kunsthalle Mainz, “Being Thing” at Centre International d’Arte et du Paysage & Treignac Projet, “About Face” at Kayne Griffin

Willem de Rooij at Le Consortium

(link)

Like Cage, for whom silence released a flood of sound, for de Rooij from the magistration of blankness comes an outpouring of reference. Cognition loathes a vacuum and in noise organizes pattern and meaning. Finds pleasure in such sterility totemized. De Rooij's is the cold grammar of industry.


See too, Willem de Rooij at Arnolfini , “Seven Reeds” at Overduin & Co., Merlin Carpenter at MD 72, David Lieske at MUMOK

Oscar Tuazon at Le Consortium & Paradise Garage

(Le Consortium, Paradise Garage)

ELI5.
Oscar Tuazon likes building, and buildings, and the ways things get built. See, generally these things are so boring and ubiquitous, we don't notice them. These everyday things. So Tuazon uses all the tropes, er, common ways of making things, but assembles them in different ways that our brains aren't bored with, that allows you to recognize or see what your brain would normally be too bored to see. So you notice even the boring stuff. See Tuazon has a feti-, er, intense like for the protestant, er, blue-collar, or like see he appreciates the common job, son. The vernacular, er, that's why nothing is that spectacular, er, that interesting. The muted tones. It's a moral ethic, son. Have you ever seen Bruce Nauman's "Setting a good corner?" Of course not you're five. Right. Okay you know that show you like, the one that depicts stuff getting made, or like those dog-eared books you have with cross-sections, cut-intos, of like brick houses and steamships?  See Tuazon's sculptures are like that. You get to see everything, you notice the structure, you glean a moral appreciation for hard work. For the structure, son. Yes, son, endlessly romantic. Nostalgic for the past. No, much different than Donnie Judd. That's why he tore the garage, paradise, down, son, to stop the party.


See too : Tomma Abts at David Zwirner , Oscar Tuazon and Eli Hansen at Maccarone