Math Bass at Mary Boone

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Like billboards they virtualize space, reaching across it through simplified forms until they are no longer lossy in scale, they become vectors, translate over space. Billboards are designed for distance. Designed for your phone. But them in a big wet space and yet they shine.

Math Bass at Mary Boone

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Like Halley, the expression of the day becoming compartmentalized, rigid. Expressionist language set to cels. Painting becomes the transactional language of advertising, images are streamlined to the force of icons, they are said to "pack a punch" a wallop of the virtual in physical space. It makes for paintings that can be painful, sensitivity traded for force. Bass somewhat retarding their transactional discomfort with an ambiguity: that though they may trade in the blows of advertising they're only trying to sell themselves, there's no unloading of some tiny salesmen in your head, just the painting. Like von Heyl, haywiring the blitz of signs today, their address is perfectly suited for the transactional pipes of the network, ads for themselves.

see too: Charline von Heyl at Capitain Petzel, Charline von Heyl at Gisela Capitain, Annette Kelm at Gio Marconi

Math Bass at Michael Jon & Alan

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Virtual Iconographies. Unlike Wesley, whose paintings we look into, these paintings come at us. Painting in the virtual space that our world increasingly appears. Space becomes an information deployment system, and layout becomes highly organized studied and manipulated. Style becomes a corruption of the subject. This one becomes a Bloomingdales, but in past Bass's paintings have been individuated works reflecting the increasing prevalence the interface over the image. Icons become shorthand redirecting thought. We understand them implicitly, terrifyingly.


See too: Matthew Brannon at Casey Kaplan