Martin Wong at Galerie Buchholz & Raúl de Nieves at Company Gallery

(Buchloz, Company)

Recently received, a lovely email (yet responded, apologies), which among else broached a question of cheesiness, which long thought short: there exists an allergy to work that isn't actively in some way rejecting the viewer. Cheese cloys. And we're antagonists. Afflict the comforted and all that. At the same time, Art has an abusive history with commodifying pain and dispossession as late-stage heroism (generally after the halo reward is blocked by several feet of dirt.)  So a hard time reconciling an embrace of Wong's body-ill-at-ease on one hand, with personal jade over de Nieves celebratory excess. And no flies on fruit ever prevented the consumption of a little dutch vanity. Jewels past their expiration date are in fact are historically ripe for most riche taste. 

see too: Kathleen Ryan at Ghebaly Gallery

Martin Wong, Aaron Gilbert at P.P.O.W

(link)

Wong's are hard, heavy, enclosing, emphasis on bars, bricks, bricks, more bricks. This was the era of neo-expressionism and this was city's expression, Wong painting what the city exuded, its own abstract expressionism. Bricks clung to the canvas like broken plate brutalism. There's just so many bricks. Very little light. Which against this dull light, Gilbert's figures grow etiolated, leggy, soft. They bend in strange ways. Squishy vulnerability. For all the bad situations they still manage to find a lot of pleasant lighting, lovely pastel color. Wong's get none, the pleasure of color is walled in the red bricks, imprisoned by police blues.  

Martin Wong at Bronx Museum

(link)

see too: Martin Wong at P.P.O.W

Martin Wong at P.P.O.W

(link)

The countless young gay artists that died of AIDs' tragedy made all the more egregious for their shared concern in an abject body, a commonality that occurred at all different points throughout each of their lives, sometimes far before, meaning that it of course had nothing to do with the tragedy that would befall them, but a representation of a common experience among them, of a body merely ill at ease in culture, now looking like a premonition.