Mungo Thomson at KARMA

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This is just the Bechers with a jazz soundtrack. 

Like Marclay's Clock, interest is subsumed to a logic, an accounting fulfilling the parameters. Quality is mere quantity, organized. Collector porn or just something to do with those stacks of old magazines. It would seem to have some relation to conceptual art, with the aesthetics of administration. But what Bernd and Hilla Becher made into an ontological question, Mungo Thompson turns into a funhouse, conceptual art with the numbing affects of cinema. There are no questions here, only bad answers. Questions depleted to games. Thompson trades the aesthetic experience for the trick of "getting it." Getting it becomes the relief. Because people hate "not getting it" and Mungo is there to apply balm that the world makes sense, that there is rationality in the system.

Peter Bradley at KARMA

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Painting like a trap for accumulating ... what? Not content precisely but something we might confuse with it. Painting like a trap fo accumulating our heads. A retainer for mental projection, light.

Ulala Imai at KARMA

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They are skulls, cultural memento mori, a vanitas post plastic, already going out of style, soft with the sugar of sentiment (and fondant flowers), passé, hints of fading photographs, like a 70s spread left to the light, going blue with that ultimate death, cliche. 

Ann Craven at KARMA & Léopold Rabus at Wilde

(Karma, Wilde)

Bird day down here at the dailies. We got scrappy paintings of birds and polished paintings of birds. Birds on blue backgrounds and sticks in the ether. Foliage and naturalism and big ole pizza pie eyes. Painters that couldn't be more different or same. Both rupturing a full connection with their aviary in the warble glass of their eye - painting - a scrappy Craven brushwork or Rabus slight doubled eye surrealism. A crack in the glass that is style, the rupture that prevents full connection to our nature's plumage, a gap to throw our guesses at meaning, the gap is value not the meaning. So they're not just birds, art birds.

Sylvie Fleury at Karma

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Art is the cargo-cult to a mass culture whose droppings they rearrange as totems to stand in for understanding. In cave paintings the mystical prey were made many times larger than the people. The ancient people were thought to trek to the rooms to be extolled by the PR about the significance of.


See also: Sylvie Fleury at Karma International

Paul Lee at Karma

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Painting is a tambourine, I guess, is the point here. Imagine touching the painting, imagine beating it in 4/4. "However, Lee subverts this with a design to imply restraint and to create a sense of longing in the work. These tambourines will not be touched and will not make a sound—their potential for movement or rhythm is only possible through a pictorial plane." I guess like all handmade art eventually hung on walls, only ever now touched through gloves or sight, it is a sort of sad existence after all the grunting love of the painter stretching the canvas, rubbing it with oils, or whatever. Somebody cared once, paintings like ashtrays of that touch.


see too: Paul Lee at Maccarone

Dike Blair at Karma

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Like Edward Hopper for Instagram times. Haunted vacancy of modern ennui. Diners and foodporn now forlorn, sad. Blair is compared to Hopper a lot it seems (and that window painting could have been cropped from "Rooms by the Sea.") But Blair's specifically rely on a photograph that negates the low-level surreality of Hoppers, stubborn to the material image. And whereas Hopper had an almost Kubrickian straight framing, all walls mirroring the frame like an architecture oppressive, Blair's view is wobbly, a bit woozy, listing in the wind, making perhaps the major difference: Hopper looks in on and documents his sad clientele, in Blair's you are the drunk. A first person shooter of cocktails. People love these, instagram was filled with them, probably because we find relief in their honesty as foodporn we can all relate to depressively.

Gertrude Abercrombie at Karma

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Barren lands whose little clues we read for any hope for meaning, trying to make sense in desolation. The last 500 years of western painting had been dedicated to championing meaning from god given gilt. We, finding god dead, erased from painting, find ourselves symbolically bereft, attempting to arranging the secular remains into something telling. That these paintings have direct lineage to today, with the reappearance of surrealism and collage in virtual spaces - you could even say this show is proleptically on time - maybe shows what we're still struggling with. Isolate and excise the background noise, find our empty environs, still trying to assemble objects that we could say matter.


Surrealism too: Matthew Cerletty at Karma, Mathew Cerletty at Office Baroque , “Pharmacy for Idiots” at Rob Tufnell, Ray Yoshida at David Nolan, Sascha Braunig at Kunsthall Stavanger, Alice Tippit at Night Club, Lui Shtini at Kate Werble, Sascha Braunig at Rodolphe Janssen, Sascha Braunig at Foxy Production, Emily Mae Smith at Rodolphe Janssen Jamian Juliano-Villani at Tanya Leighton, David Lieske at MUMOK, Gina Litherland at Corbett vs. Dempsey

Mathew Cerletty at Karma

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like the Back to the Future retro-avant we see currently dominating fashion and politics, nostalgia is candied. The "again" of greatness we are implored to make becomes unhinged from any particular time the imperative could point at. "Again" becomes merely reactionary twist to flood cliche with the nostalgia fueling it. "Again" never was but today repainting the past. These paintings are that "again:" signifieds ripped from referable time. Painting translates into into some anachronistic slide of retro-present, between icons, CGI renderings, "photorealism," illustrations: whatever their means of referring to any realness is lost, and this loss of reality ironically allows the viewer or voter to inflate with their interpretable own. Depictions have all but become completely untethered from physicality, and Cerletty has seeming captured the balloons adrift. These are fake images, but inability to determine the level of artificiality makes them unnerving. Cerletty's stripping the metadata turns everything into clues pointing as interpretable evidence to a time that never took place but in the speakers allowing you to formulate it yourself.


see too: Mathew Cerletty at Office Baroque 

Ann Craven at KARMA

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Unsure what means, finding Craven's paintings almost pleasant now after so many years thinking their abominableness was surely the point. Is this Stockholm syndrome, or has Painting simply filled with her derivatives making Craven's appear buoyant, floating on her lineage. Even what had seemed so saccharine, seems now somehow tastefully polite. Or a literal process of desensitization, Craven's endlessly repeated imagery eventually producing "diminished emotional responsiveness to a negative, aversive or positive stimulus after repeated exposure to it."  You can learn to feel a coping apathy toward any repeated stimulus, called "learned helplessness in rats."

see too: Ann Craven at Southard Reid, Ann Craven at Confort Moderne

Ida Applebroog at KARMA

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Liquidity for flesh, each of us a taut water balloon filled with blood, its hard not to see biomorphic anthropocentrically, and the drawing morph to relate their objects to our flesh, see postage think intestines.  Made while the artist was self-committed to an psychiatric institution its harder too not to see the drawings as waypoint thinking between the body and object constructed by a erroneous mind. How could the world not look psychedelic.


See too: Larry Poons at Michael Jon & Alan, Alice Tippit at Night Club, Nicolas Deshayes at Modern Art

Lee Lozano at KARMA

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Hard to do better linguistic service to Lozano than the Molesworth quoted in the PR. And then what better book than Lehrer-Graiwer's One Work, Dropout, taking Hainley's detective format (though in far more FBI sanctioned means) to find the criminal gone and the epilogue, the loss, as the climax. And so despite the wellness of our language's attention it doesn't yet deplete the metaphorical meat from behind their crust. And Which like the dropout itself, painting a series of subjectivities, of choices, consequential actions leading to a piece bereft of its initiator, the death of their author, and their corpse surface left as a reflection of us.

Mark Grotjhan at Karma

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Artists' private esteem for the simple, functional object. These objects against which art feels inconsequential, inadequate against their elemental usefulness: the crafted integrity of functional objects that nobly perform their service, blue-collarly. Of course the painter feels a private respect for the signboard, it performs what the artist cannot. The handcrafted simplicity creating a directness of intention that art is forbidden.
Grotjahn says as much in in the PR.
And then detached from their context they return to performing the art trope of functionality without purpose, of signifier detached from its -fied, we receive them but there is no hotdog or High Life to manifest. They become totemic or omen-like, mystified, connote but do not mean, become hieroglyphs of a culture lost.


See too: Gedi Sibony at The Arsenale , Oscar Tuazon at Le Consortium & Paradise Garage , On Kawara at the Guggenheim

“Popular Images III” at Karma

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4 artists, 4 points creating trajectory cut across a spectrum of tone, from a delicate hesitancy to the overt use of its ephebic delicacy as style, and then that style's co-option in advertorial seduction, and then that seduction replaced with forcible assault.

See too: “Popular Images” at Karma

Stanley Whitney at Karma

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Whitney toys with arbitrariness. Caroming off the totally indiscrimant to float in some nether zone of baroque frivolousness that feels odd. Opposing Gunther Forg's true flippancy, Whitney's seem instead pre-programmed to maintain a flat-footed aloofness, an askewness that seems herr to much of continually strafing and blunt painters of today, Joe Bradley, Josh Smith, etc. a willful deafness.

“Popular Images” at Karma

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"Popular images" is a perfect name. While appropriation dealt with images specific, today's hand-me-down version diffuses appropriation as a genericism, the culturally dispersed vagueness, accumulated echos in the gunked corners of visibility that we usually wash off our eyes, the hyper-distilled image of all the generic shit we see.
This inhabitation of the generic is meant as a critical doubling, to embody the other in clean assimilation of a replicant criticality, inverted where the ostensibly artistic human desires the borg-like reproductive body of capital info-machines. This doubling is expected as opposition to its takeover, but it may betray a latent desire to welcome the new overlords, to see the body destructed, and offer aid to the enemy. Like us and our reproductive master.

2 more versions of this show to come.

Robert Grosvenor at Karma

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The awkward of minimalism of Grosvenor, a sort of cartoony literalness. The “sculpture” here, the triangular vehicle, becomes dreamlike fetish or totem. Impossible to understand as either sculpture or functional object, it’s surreal like all those lobster telephones or floating basketballs, suspended between art and enterprise.
Best in the artless construction, the simple cum uncanny, off. Photos of vernacular construction whose means make a sort of sense, but odd. Makers who follow their own impossibly developed logic to its own ends. The blue steps. The impossibly phallic car. The little wheel.