Hiroshi Sugito at Lulu

(link)

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! 

Tunji Adeniyi-Jones at Morán Morán

(link)

There is no narrative anymore. There is only soup, a Matisse boiled alive, a figured consumed, a PR acting as an ingredient label: "arts and crafts" "Yoruban" "Mexican Mural" flavoring. A more refined soup compared to the squalor punk of, say, Max Brand's squat house gruel. Soups are everywhere today. "Soup is easy to mass produce: a base prepared in advance can be used to a support a wide and readily available ingredients on its surface." The point being soups are brought to taste, you might even like yours.

See too: Max Brand

Evian Wenyi Zhang at Lulu

(link)

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

(link)

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

Danny McDonald at House of Gaga

(link)

This is the interpretation box of art. (see: yesterday) A object we can't see "inside," so place its empty vessel to skull, ask for clues. From the debris of culture. Making this cargo-cult art. The compostionalized altars of cultural refuse. We are welcome to interpret the reassembly of it. Assemblage meaning. Composition as a device we associate with art, and art with meaning. Therefore these edible arrangement of content makes "art" - which is meaningful, tautologically. Ostensibly. 

See too: Danny McDonald, Cargo Cult

Stanley Whitney at Galerie Nordenhake

(link)

"sunsets [are] the near endless regurgitations of saccharine accident. Incidental returns on arbitrary conditions, each completely unique and endlessly the same. A triple-point of beauty, arbitrariness, meaning." Do sunsets mean? 

We want to see the human through the bars of its conditions, a contest of life whose winner grants freedom, acceptance. We prisoners who make art in attempt to prove we have souls. Live forever.

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 

Sam Pulitzer at House of Gaga

(link)

"On the internet you would see items auto-designed by algorithms, the internet dredged of images to place it on a mug, Walmart printing an iPhone case with a man in diapers. Everything onto everything. Vertigo in feeling one's toes sense the full ocean of production. A tornado of reference and attachment, and the audience attempting to see in the whirl anything to relieve the anxiety of so much garbage. "

PR: "consciously creates unprecedented combinations of form without guaranteeing that they will resemble anything at all in our ordinary, sinful world or even in the otherworldly realm of pure form."

PR: "this visual detritus would be found laying in wait for redemption as aureoles of broken fate."

"Hoarding as a sort of extended compassion for the derelict neglected of culture, a sympathy moving to material a world simply would like to rid itself of. Composing it into art objects becomes a blessing for sending the objects into the "heavenly" afterlife ... Hooking the hose from the expelling parts of our cultural body to the part that feeds, [ass to head.]"

See too: Darren Bader at Andrew Kreps, Ser Serpas at LUMA Westbau

Pasiphae at House of Gaga

(link)

Pellicer was Metcalf's 4th wife, his third wife was Pellicer's sister (with whom he had children), and this is but one fun fact in lives wildly full of them. Wars, missing fingers, metal smithing communes, Paris, Brando. Surprise no movies have been made. The world is as full of stories as it is of art. This shouldn't feel like competition, but it does. Preserving the art, even good, seems like wrong archaeology. Keeping what we have the showrooms for. 

see too: Ana Pellicer at House of Gaga

Isabel Nuño de Buen at Lulu

(link)

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

(link)

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

(link)

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

(link)

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

(link)

"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

Tom Allen at Lulu

(link)

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

(link)

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

(link)

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

(link)

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