Hiroshi Sugito at Lulu

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Coy? Being this cute? This formally shameless. Hidden amongst the shambles a resolute belief in the highest laws of royal painting. Without quite being it. Oh you just want to rage against objects so [x].  A king wearing a pauper's uniform, an anarchist's A, you're no hermit, you're a monarchist, to the throne of painting, a prince! 

Evian Wenyi Zhang at Lulu

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The book page, the altar piece, the comic panel, cubism (ostensibly), Google Images, GUI space, the "F shape" web structure. Information design, every so often a new way of looking is invented, discovered.  The form creates the seeing, realigns the world. Not sure this is it, but it's a noble pursuit. 

Kinke Kooi at Lulu

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The coastline paradox: any increase in measurement's accuracy produces a commensurate increase in length: better measuring only moves a coastline's mileage towards infinity. Similar a hyperbolic geometry like green leaf lettuce and frill and Kooi's superfluity - increases in a descriptive power only release further metaphor, an excess of reference, description becomes the watering can, flowering a loaded lettuce content, a power for suggestion, leaving you, pervert, with pesticides spread against tumescence. 

committing language: Kinke Kooi at Lucas Hirsch, Ron Nagle at Modern Art

Zhiliang Zhao at Lulu & Hélène Fauquet at Édouard Montassut

(Zhao, Fauquet)

Two strategies in our current glass. One manifests an excess materiality as defense - declarative flag in mud. The other exacerbates glass. That we look through so much glass today has refracted art to implicitly shift around this invisible structure framing our experience: this why we see so much mud today, so many cartoons for instagram, so much iconographic surrealism with the depth of iPad. The world is viewed predominantly through these lenses, through lens, glass, 4k screen. Seeing Jasper Johns in person like viewing a woolly mammoth at the history center. "Oh they have art on computers now." We bend around and through it. We've been saying this for a while are you bored yet?

See too: Tony Conrad's Glass, Materialphilia, Federico Herrero at Lulu, Rose Marcus at Night Gallery, Hélène Fauquet at Edouard Montassut 

Isabel Nuño de Buen at Lulu

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Assemblage by the sea. Crusted, coralized. Colors approaching, but never quite, seafoam. More a bleached shellfish reference. Sort kelp-y. My Octopus Teacher or Kevin Costner in Waterwold-core? This is the ambiguity in question. Or, maybe more associated with the crustables: Miho Dohi, Daniel Rios Rodriguez, Lin May Saeed. ... wait, is this Lulu-core?

Lewis Hammond at Casa Masaccio

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Dark in amber, scenes held in brown glass. A "wine dark sea," a Homerian world devoid of azure. It seems less like we are seeing scenes than seeing them reflected in another substance, using a mirror to inspect the bathroom, a reflection to infer the world around you. An aberration in the glass or in you.

Federico Herrero at Lulu

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In our fishbowl isolation we look out through so much glass. Through your monitor through a photographer's camera lens. Through the gallery's look-but-don't-touch air imitating glass and, in the distance, a painting's stained glass, zoomed pixels. Which are material turned highly-tuned images, windows, more glass compressed into a final glass, a code, a jpeg, our vitreous body. We try to polish this glass further and further, correct for it, so it seems like we aren't just seeing it, a fishbowl. If you move a fishbowl does it experience a different part of the world? Do you see glass? You can purchase Christmas through it.

Paul P. at Lulu & Queer Thoughts

(QT, Lulu)

These are bit gratuitous, no? There shouldn't be this much desire, resting on the surface, as if the surface itself exuded it like the soap out of Madame X's dress, a painting condition called saponification, "a deformation often described as 'blooming' or 'efflorescence'". Centuries old paintings literally drip soap. Velasquez added too much of his painting medium to her dress in attempts to make it like oil, he desired too much a dress like a pool of onyx, and his in his desire like an inverse Icarus his painting exuded a white liquid to cleanse him. Of impurity, hubris. And P.'s structure become excuse to hang painting's flowers, blooms, cause shimmers in paint. Look how the painter's hand trembles, painting with one hand. As they become factories for desire. The steam is hung by painter.  Is this much desire, sentimentality okay?  Do these men sweat, or does the painter sweat for them? The glass of fashion. Desire placed on like a mask. DFW: "Her expression is from Page 18 of the Victoria’s Secret catalogue." Disappear behind it, no?


See too: Tony Conrad's Glass, Louisa Gagliardi at Open Forum

Tom Allen at Lulu

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Flowers after all are the lighted landing strips of insect air travel. The Vegas strip sign advertising sex and nectar to bees, birds. What did Zizek say about tulips, "an open invitation to all insects and bees, 'Come and screw me.'" Flowers perform better in the UV light of the sod's eyes. So paint them as such, in all their lurid arbitrariness. PR:"a maniacal inquiry into color, form and space."
CAWD earlier: "No one really certain why flowers are beautiful to humans... some believe in primeval human's use in marking where fruit would later be while others going so far to state flower's cross-species interest as evidence for an innate and low-level hardwiring of a concrete biological concept of beauty independent of any productivity. Marking food sounds truer. And perhaps this crass evolutionary productivity substantiating floral pulchritude might be why flowers are called "the lowest of the genres," gaming the system with hardwired desire. However what artist has ever been above cheating?"
Flowers are "an object as experimental-constant through which an artist may perform tortures on a cultural concept of beauty." Vegas; Zizek again: "I think that flowers should be forbidden to children."


See too: Willem de Rooij at Arnolfini, “Miranda” at Anat Ebgi & “A Change of Heart” at Hannah Hoffman,  Jenine Marsh at Lulu

Yuji Agematsu at Lulu

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Expelled from cultural bowels onto streets and corners, and hook it to the intellect, placing the ass into the head, its virtual cubes, its broadcast mechanism, its hermetic boxes, proffering it, holding it in hands up, saying look at this shit. The new ecologies of waste. In old Germania the toilets were backwards and you would poop onto a shelf so you could face your fear. Look at what you had done. The ropes of your making on stark white planes. It had some medical diagnostic purpose, to know what you had expelled, reading tea leaves in shallow pools, to determine how our cultural digestion was going.


See too: Ser Serpas at LUMA Westbau, Dylan Spaysky at Good Weather, Dylan Spaysky at Clifton Benevento, Melvin Edwards at Daniel Buchholz, Henrik Olesen at Schinkel Pavilion,  Henrik Olesen at Cabinet, Henrik Olesen at Reena Spaulings, Nancy Lupo at Kristina Kite & Yuji Agematsu at Miguel Abreu, Martin Soto Climent at Michael Benevento & Yuji Agematsu at The Power Station, Yuji Agematsu at Real Fine Arts, Yuji Agematsu at Artspeak, “May the Bridges I Burn Light the Way” at STANDARD (OSLO)

Ambera Wellmann at Lulu

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Morning's animated cartoons looked molded in latex, anthropomorphic rabbits injected molded, a latent erotic awakening later as any number of sexual proclivities, substance has sort of intrinsic qualities that we relate to. “Flesh was the reason oil paint was invented," said painter before violently rearranging his women. "A slick glass perspires over your naked body in coitus," and Wellmann's erotics glazed like wet porcelain, now shattered. Into remains of ambiguity we could call less a gestural innuendo leaving the perverts guessing (a la Cecily Brown pre-2001) but a more literally read erotics against interpretation. We are looking for ways to make the body reappear, preferably not a cartoon but a living thing bloodfilled thing. And blushing reveals our vase's vulnerability, the blood inside, offered close to the skin, close to letting. It was Darwin’s “most human emotion,” Sexual stimulation causes blushing, and thus the sexually engorged ensure audiences the actors are filled with blood, and so die first in horror, blooded before its letting. But the point in both sex and horror is to see what's just below the surface a pool.


see too: Nicola Tyson at Friedrich Petzel, Nicola Tyson at Nathalie Obadia, The violence against faces. Lisa Yuskavage at Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Genieve Figgis at Almine Rech, Miriam Cahn at Meyer Riegger, Ruby Neri at David Kordansky, Julien Nguyen at Modern Art, Tomoo Gokita at Taka Ishii

“Naturally” at Lulu

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The Lulu-esque, here all the hallmarks: fragility, a lumpishness, but "naivety" in quotes, found object assembled with the lightest touch, even a quasi-naturalist underpinning, like a penchant for wounded denim, then finally paintings lovely, softly. We could almost call this exhibition a paragon of it, of Lulu. But there's something missing, some ever so slight edge, a metallic taste like a bitterness, like the fruit is fake, or the objects are metallic, or hung from metals, or of car crashes, or some of glob trottery, as a certain say Sharpness we usually find that has become the artistry of it.

AR: Lin May Saeed at Lulu

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Making art that expresses care for animals by carving it out of material that if left uncared for would quickly degrade and release poisons to harm those animals depicted is sort like selling artworks as pulled-pin grenades in a puppy shelter, "here, would you mind holding this?" Sort of expressing the suicide games pretty much everyone believes we're playing now in the anthropocene's foot-to-the-pedal towards brick walls type of time period. Why not take a grenade home, why not bring back some of this asbestos to protect the earth if not your home, these animals need you.


See too: Cooper Jacoby at Freedman Fitzpatrick, Piero Gilardi at Frankfurt Am Main, “May the Bridges I Burn Light the Way” at STANDARD, Nancy Lupo at Antenna Space, 3 Shows: Julia Scher Lin May Saeed, Fernando Palma Rodriguez

Jiří Kovanda at Lulu

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Like a less evil Michael Krebber, the lightness of Kovanda's touch, if you believe in it, can feel like cool breeze against all the hot air generally steaming up the place. Like all those performances and documentation of those performances, this too is documentation of a placement. Which providing the romantic fantasy that this is all the touch one needs to move, to survive, you get to imagine this as your labor. The weight of the floss embodying the low level weight that you too could begin to carry if you removed burden. Kovanda's slow traces poke fun at us over how heavy our own trudging is.

B. Wurtz at Lulu

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The American Gym Sock. Tied to teenage boys, normally repositories of filth, seed, and feet, normally locker room attire, a pubescent attire, pimples and athletics, is here given an absurdly fastidious clean, highlighting its cotton and comfort, restoring purity, virginal phallus and receiver of course. To say nothing of their wonkiness, bent, queer. The most apparent quality though always the cleanliness, cleanliness in the face of such plainness, fixated on such trivial details.


see too: “The Crack-Up” at Room East (B. Wurtz)

Hayley Tompkins at Lulu

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Schmutz and stuff, and schmutz on stuff, Tompkins' practice endeared to the goo, the stuff, like all those edges of Jasper Johns, or encaustics, the stroke into hyperbole, like its own totem.  Like painters who manifesto'd their unneeding to hide brushstrokes, a literalness conflated with honesty, we find schmutz to be authentic, anti to the glitz and glam of the advertorial and mass, instead its the personal we trust, the good neighbor, the mom-n-pop, the trustworthy crust of the rustic intentional.

Daniel Rios Rodriguez at Lulu

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The crust laden and the spiritual, it's hard to do sentimentality in art without being an outsider. You can't paint a flower without ironizing its loveliness, your desire to impress this. Sentimentality drips into its performance, theatrical, a too-much-presence and we blush for the artist having fallen into the trap of their own subjectivity for them, too often. Thick paint helps. It alleviates with its own paintertly over-presence, which provides, if not an ironizing, at least a solidarity. The paint expresses materially the same excess as the subject is. Confidence in clumsiness, endlessly endearing, a situation where you'll want to care for them.


See too: James Lee Byars at VeneKlasen/Werner

Jenine Marsh at Lulu

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Radioactive green lakes were once the nuclear age's symbol of ecological apocalypse, doom and gloom type scenario, a hyperbolic green and dead that today's lakes and rivers actually do turn fed by the nitrogen-rich run-off of hyper-agriculture's fertilizers and poisonous suburban lawns that dogs must stay off for 24 hours blooming the pristine green lawns of everyone's micro-aristocracy, a new form of ecological apocalypse in which the difference in green between sci-fi premonition's barren radioactive is indistinguishable from the lake's hypoxic spring bearing too much life, an indistinguishability that has something to with Marsh's exhibition here.

see too: Willem de Rooij at Arnolfini

Ian Kiaer at Lulu

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Kiaer's fetishism - in which objects gain authority through compositional attention, finickyness as gospel (think Fried's theater and the "arrangements" of minimalism's staging of viewership doubled w/ awareness of this expectation), the vestigial dust detritus and bits, remnants totemized by a self-aware anticipation of the viewer, and arranged for them - is probably the best argument against speculatory theories. The arrangements anticipate the viewer, appear as though inhabited, sentient by the specificity of their arrangement, a logic which cannot be seen but inferred, winking, and attributed to the Wizard of Oz, an intelligent design from some immanent spectre, but really just a smokeless mirror and us believing again in ghosts. The mirror reveals something way more interesting than that. A paraphilia in which the actual objects are substituted by an administration of attention.


Michael E Smith at Lulu, Michael E. Smith at Susanne Hilberry, Zak Kitnick at Clearing, Renaud Jerez at William Arnold

“The Lulennial: A Slight Gestuary” at Lulu

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The slight gesture a contemporary variant in lineage with the objet de vertu, extravagant ornaments who meekness was their spectacle - the supplicant's eggs crusted with jewels containing vessels and the time - and in which today old precious metals traded for preciousness. A Tuttelesque romanticism for the little things, to tiny knots, and the curve of a hand repeated. To the senitmental weight of string. Both contain their paradox, of the tiny object as spectacle, and the trinket as sublime. A fragile a-collectibility in imminently collectable packages, made for its document, the package of photography that delivers it.

See too : Single Moms at Vilma Gold