Fergus Feehily, Günther Förg at June

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At first an odd duo. But time deironizes, dissolves the difference between stupid and reason to a painting leaden before you. Though Förg may be lineage in the neanderthal abstraction to Joe Bradley or Josh Smith avant-nappies, in the end Feehily's seemingly less industrial more underdog engine may be no differently dead. 

See too: Fergus Feehily at Misako & Rosen, Günther Förg at Barbel Graesslin

Günther Förg at Barbel Graesslin

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It was hard to argue with the slightly stupified version of Forg's modernism. Awkward buildings colors and installations, scribbled pleasures later. Rendered dumb, it didn't speak to anyone, rather happy with, instead, simple existence, becoming a stone in the modernist pathway, a weighing down ideals of transcendence, like attempting to see a Rothko with a pile weighing heavy in your bowels, the work refuses to lift one beyond the limits of your earthly human presence, the usual higher pleasures lifting spirits instead hamstrung to leave you right where you already are.


See too: Heimo Zobernig at Kunsthaus Bregenz, Heimo Zobernig at Simon Lee, Heimo Zobernig at Indipendenza, Heimo Zobernig at Petzel, Krupp, MUDAM

Günther Förg at Barbel Graesslin

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The eponymous "relief" of the exhibition comes from the work's insipid blankness as "fundamentally soothing to nervous system" - as David Foster Wallace once reasoned his recurrent reading of a particular column of Cosmo magazine - a subscription to the infantilizing soothe of a overloaded system proffered paralysis, a shutdown, the catatonic aphasia of Reality TV, celebrity tabloids, and now paintings, in which the real is replaced with its dummy version, relief from problems by a warm and swollen balloon replacement, the real replaced with a sex with an inflatable on Ambien, fundamentally soothing, just like these painting.