Miriam Cahn at The Power Plant

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Painting today is made to hang well behind desks. Blame Gerhard Richter "powerful" benign abstraction. Safe. The beautiful paintings Cahn's can't really be mistaken for. Color instead a cruelty. Chicken plucked flesh. An acid replacing lipstick. There is too much content, unmistakeable, with an ambiguous antagonist. Is that birth going well? is the smiley faced sex? The general moments of happiness (sex, handjobs, infants) instead unsafe. This all sounds so direly over-the-top, so excessive. But maybe that's why it works. There's no couching it. No excuse to hang well over you.

Miriam Cahn at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía

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They look like drawings made by children to be diagnosed by therapists. And wearing their analysis on their sleeve. There's no confusion as to what these relate. And this should make them mawkish, sentimental, but the hammy naiveté only underscores. So much "bad painting" comes with an ironic wink made, generally, by grown men who affect their idiot savant, pretend Picassoing. These instead are too much, their saccharineness becomes its own abjection. Real stupidity, not feigned.


See too:Miriam Cahn at Meyer Riegger, Miriam Cahn at Jocelyn Wolff, Miriam Cahn at Meyer Riegger, Calvin Marcus at Clearing

Miriam Cahn at Meyer Riegger

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Like heat maps for sensation, it could be unendurable cheese, e.g. "the red stands for love" but its  their tenuous walk over the chasm of schmaltz that feels like its relationship to horror - the body's ability to fall into a meat grinder or sentimentality, crushed like Precious Moments figurines. There's something so fragile about our ability to feel empathy, to feel tender. We're stupid creatures that are easy to break. The ability for Cahn to at any moment move firmly into the world of melodrama feels as much a threat as violence, she could destroy them with a heart emoji.

Miriam Cahn at Meyer Riegger

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Cahn is important, perhaps like Andrew Wekua, in the age of the digital euphemising the body, that someone retensions connection to our corporeality. The body is battleground of artists deciding how to represent it back to us. An artist can drop it from a height over and over again and care nothing for it if they so wish. Cahn seems to care, even while suspending its pink people over the sandpaper causticness of its abrasive color, one of a very few painters to make painting's bright beauty a violent thing. and against people like rubbed erasers, pink and sensitive worn forms. Painting can do a real violence to balloons filled with red liquid. Rubbed of noses, devoid of hair, flesh the color of factory chicken skin. The manifold meanings of the adjective tender, "showing gentleness" as well as "sensitive to pain."  "(of meat) easy to cut."



See too: Miriam Cahn at Jocelyn Wolff, Group Show at Meyer Riegger, Lisa Yuskavage at Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Nicola Tyson at Friedrich Petzel, Tala Madani at David Kordansky,  Andro Wekua at Sprüth Magers, Michaël Borremans at Dallas Museum of Art, Erwin Wurm at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg

Group Show at Meyer Riegger

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We'll just list some decent work in this exhib: Mauser's crushed can Kobros, Saâdane Afif's baroque citational posters, Salvo's pre-Nicolas Party awkward, Posenenske's tableaus, Armleder's power-farts, etc.
But can we talk about that Miriam Cahn painting. Jesus. Attaining that magic otherness of "outsider" artists without actually being so. Soft horror, childlike and maternal. A crepuscular thumb indeterminate. The marks seem to stand more for actions than depiction, as in a face constructed of movements against it, but way less theatrical than Bacon. of the horror of our features removed, of the loss of the container, flesh. Such gentle, tender, violence.

Nicolas Party at Gregor Staiger , Miriam Cahn at Jocelyn Wolff , Group Show at David Kordasky

Miriam Cahn at Jocelyn Wolff

(Miriam Cahn at Jocelyn Wolff)

The material presence of Cahn’s dusty surfaces that the work is predicated on is here instead given a physical presence to occupy real space, the spectral planes become exhibitionist bodies, hewn logs simply scattered. This of course is the most romantic - nearing nostalgic - pleasure afforded by art today, to remember the days of bodies. Yet overt sentimentality is balanced in their formal dumbness, the directness of the intention, the pleasure of physical bodies without the formal wankery of Puryear. Just dumb lumps molded to softness, sanded skin looking like dough, the gross stupidity of our bodies, something entirely erotic about the fan shape etched in flesh.

See too: Cathy Wilkes at Tramway