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.

Bernadette Corporation at House of Gaga

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The point being, the brand of the artist was tantamount to the work which created and informed the brand. Not a painting but a Picasso. Identity was always a governing force of art's valuation. Art's function is more often the creation of this identity/brand. The lamentations for any current identity vogue fail to realize that this was core to art. The metadata to art is often more telling than its object. 

See too: Bernadette Corporation at Stedelijk Museum

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

Shimon Minamikawa at Lulu Annex

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"fraught tradition of painting and repetition. One thinks of everything from Morandi’s heartbreakingly beautiful depictions of vases and bottles to On Kawara’s dry, no frills paintings of dates. The German painter Peter Dreher’s commitment to painting the same exact drinking glass for decades comes to mind."

would like to think of CAWD in this way, repetition, attempting to bracket something, everyday looking at the same glass. 

See too: Glass

Naomi Rincón Gallardo at Parallel Oaxaca

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A PhD in art. Thoughts on doctoral necessitude arts once alit the artworld. Now here we are. Pursuing it. Can calls for anti-colonialist practices come from inside the house?

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

Cosima von Bonin at House of Gaga & Magasin III Jaffa

(Gaga, Magasin)

The first show of Cosima von Bonin in both Mexico and Israel the press releases with trumpets. Which feels more colonial than culturally humanitarian, proffering the west's hegemony further into the world. New outposts everywhere. How dreary it would have to lack proximity to these objects of capital. A tooting symptomatic of our belief in art as a beneficial if not outright moral substance in need of spread, of announcement. The commodity is the form we now think in, and these are teh "good" commodities.

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

Fernanda Gomes at Museo Jumex

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A series of decisions. Decision which prove intention, intention which becomes a perfume dispersing to all corners of the space. Our noses grow tired of perfume, of rooms, but this has a refresh rate: further and further compositionalizing the room into smaller and smaller sections, fractals, shrinking like that incredible man who finally tiny dissolves into the fabric of the space, everything becomes part of it, the space is "activated," and we are greeted to a total feng shui, everything has been touched. Everyone comments on Gomes's monochromism, painting stuff white, but really they're just seeing mirrors reflecting the walls.



See too: Oscar Tuazon at Le Consortium & Paradise Garage

“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

“Tiger-Poems & Songs for Hurricanes” at Travesía Cuatro

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"If this so called pre-primitivism allows us to shake the foundations of our epistemological pride, then this “perspective” is a valuable one, that should be re-activated constantly in times of visual overconfidence."

visual overconfidence. The argument for painting "primitively" as a reaction against our new techno razzle dazzle's authority, presenting a frailer subject requiring a viewer's empathy and understanding rather than administering a visual flexing to stand in for validity. Like breaking your dog's leg before the dog show, you won't win the prize, but you might get a people's choice award.

Cerith Wyn Evans at Museo Tamayo

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We've been staring at lights for a hundred thousand years, fire to hearth to television to phones, the light we arrange our living rooms around, surely finding comfort in our control, ability to channel and manipulate forces. We can now flaunt it, bend the tubes of capital to allow its flows to move through our neon, make it baroque to brandish it - its light as proof of our life, the lights are on, we are vital. Where once the fire was symbol of home, lights are now proof of capitalistic viability: an artist keeping the lights on.


See too: Cerith Wyn Evans at Galerie Neu, Sam Lewitt at Kunsthalle Basel

“Casa Tomada” at Calle 22 12BIS

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Folly the metonym for the whole exhibition, in a box. Like the robotic Terminator arriving amidst lighting and nudity encased in the flesh of Arnold to travel time, corrugate is the body allowing a virtual system of "online shopping," a physically sloughable stuff to allow transaction, a box like the gallery is the repository for global cargo, vacuuming objects across worlds for its networkization back at you to prove transactablity, coinage. You arrive in Berlin find American artists, America to find a retrospective of French, Mexico to see the globe liberally interspersed into the local, the world into franchises like the suburbs we all hated. These permeable body boxes whose contents seem less important than their ability to be moving weight. 

Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda at House of Gaga

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Artists continually forcing a reading between the lines they force distinctly apart so that the blank white space feels ominous and full, like a detective novel, figure it out, Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda adept at objects in aura of evidence or clues. Bits of knowledge that are brought up in the PR, starting with the failure of the cult to deliver its prophecies, its promised cataclysm falling to a gaping white nothing burger, a lot like the art's lines. Providing no auto-bloodshed or endorsement, instead a musing on the aquarium shark (and its connection to Hirst) as a symbol of contemporary art's "predicted avant-garde revolutions [that] never came to pass" and the "set of special texts, rituals, and institutions whose purpose is to manage the disparity between the prophecy and the reality of its non- appearance."  This is all uninteresting, another meditation of art's failed deliverance we've been rehashing for 20 years but now cults and sharks and texts. Except for the text accompanyment which is itself its little own hard-boiled plot that itself empties and fills like a corpse on the beach and you could attempt to use the detective's cultish tools to attempt post-mortem on the story's failure to deliver catacylsm or just think of it as "set of special texts, rituals, and institutions whose purpose is to manage the disparity between the prophecy and the reality of its non-appearance."



See too: Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda at Francesca Pia, Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda at 356 Mission

Oa4s at Lodos

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The rising ubiquity of the lab, our alchemical noodling in povera forms, roleplay to deal with trauma of not having our own, expressions of our desire for productivity and vitality of scientist's real results, like children who feign adult, play house, to feel like they have one, the human impulse to invent magic, gods, to fill the coldness of their absence, to feel the glow of control, even in invented worlds, until the adults come in and strip the sheets off our nakedness.

Some labs: Elaine Cameron-Weir at VENUS Los Angeles, Oscar Tuazon and Eli Hansen at Maccarone, “Lemurenheim” at Meyer Kainer, Kyle Thurman and Zak Kitnick at Parapet Real Humans, William Leavitt at MAMCO, Cooper Jacoby at Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, 

Ad Minoliti at Agustina Ferreyra

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An argument had, can a triangle be a funny triangle?, formal objects able to emote subjectivity, or like Mondrian or af Klint a channeling of forces beside themselves. Can objects transacted through history or persons become grounds for conducting identities, become gendered. "How would an aphrodisiac painting look?"

Ana Pellicer at House of Gaga

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Huge jewelry, what could be better, smarter? The idea is almost psychotically perfect, magnificent. Bejewel the architecture, placed around the institution's neck, in the courtyard, what all those modernist objects implicitly stood as, pearls for a building, softening stark verticality. These were made to adorn the Statue of Liberty, but sensibly they fit anywhere, fill the same function, there's been a rise in jewelry/art crossovers, in the youth of today, and its because maybe we realize it's no different.


See too: Lucy Skaer at MRAC,  Amanda Ross-Ho at The Approach, K.r.m. Mooney at Pied-á-terre