Nika Kutateladze at Modern Art

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What is it with painters and the wastelands? Is it that the plains mirror the virtual plane of imagination, the blank void of painting, ready for projection?

The Wasteland: Gertrude Abercrombie at Karma, Adrian Morris at Galerie Neu, Tala Madani at David Kordansky, Tala Madani at 303 Gallery, Alexandra Noel at Freedman Fitzpatrick, Atlantis, Maryam Hoseini at High Art

Richard Tuttle at Modern Art

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You got to hand it to Tuttle, he never cashed in, never cast it in bronze. Instead still the pernickety things hard to swallow, like fishing lures they need only approximate the shiny fish of formalism. Provisional objects still hook us. Look how crappy that sculpture is. Is this cute? Coy? Useless? Still resolutely ugly in a formally confetti way, continually falling apart is what they were meant to. 

Terry Winters at Modern Art

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Terry Winters is proof that dumb painting can look smart with the whiff of information, science, intelligence. The gentlest hint of reason. So bubble up signs in mud, possible glyphs to understanding. Because we want paintings that speak, mean.

Like all those microscopic slides whose abstraction we nonscientists can't assess but are told hold meaning. Isn't that the perfect analogy for art?

We apophenic machines: Antek Walczak at Jenny’s

Mohammed Sami at Modern Art

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Painting is affect nailed to content. A vibe sewn to image. Internally, the content withdraws to mystery, creating a distending space where paint floats above a darkening void. An interface of brush and flowers, in foliage a search for clues, a search for where to lay meaning. This is what painting must tension as its interminable life support. This is what we prize painting for, the mud writ question

See: Shannon Cartier Lucy at Hussenot 

Karla Black at Modern Art

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A career of post-candy minimalism.  If it "makes [you] wish [you] were a jellyfish," it's because it belongs to an order of "certain gelatinous members," what only a Ctenophore's primitive nervous system - lacking the higher order judgement of brain - can feel. This is the raw stuff - the snortable stuff - the stuff pastry companies and instagram rearrange your subject, your taste, an entire generation of Millennial Pink on. Physical embodiments of color swatches gone sculpture. 

See too: Karla Black

Sarah Rapson at Modern Art

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As our arts fight against the endless behind-glassing of virtualization, the distressed look of materiality is in right now. But these seem less about flaunting swatches of a quickly etherealizing world than about an insistence on the material substrates of our thought. A reminder that these are the moldy objects we build our empire on. 2,000 years of grandiose diction projected on slowly eroding blankets. We proclaim "painting now and forever." In reality it will last as long as it's cared for. Not so much painting/materiality as the loss of. Be careful.

see too: Lutz Bacher at Galerie Buchholz and Sarah Rapson at Essex Street

Sanya Kantarovsky, Camille Blatrix at Modern Art

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Artists engaging in traditional crafts, marquetry and woodblock. But tradition was wiped out by the invention of capitalist plastic. Labor was reduced to work, and craft became manufacturing processes, became laser cut wood, CNC milled blocks, a thousand interns on call. Suddenly your dreams could be injection molded. Ostensibly. And these are two artists who's importance is the plasticity of style - the sort of whatever possibility of plastic goos, bent for artistic purposing. New images in old habits. So it's odd then to have a press release calling the whole thing into question, a excerpt from a 1906 book of traditional wood crafts lamenting novelty:

"If there is one quality which more than another marks the demand of the present day it is the requirement of novelty. ...the question is not, 'Is this fresh thing good? Is it well-fitted for its intended uses?' but 'Is it novel?' ... dispens[ing] with tradition, and ... set forth with childlike naïveté. Careful study of these experiments discloses the fact that .... the undigested use of natural motifs results not in nourishment but in nightmare"

This would all depend on whether we believe this art to be "undigested designs indifferently executed which have little but a fancied novelty to recommend them.” Not a "...a saner view of what constitutes originality by setting before them something of the experience of past times, when craft tradition was still living and the designer had a closer contact with the material in which his design was carried out than is usual at present." Surely this is not today. But there's something I'm not willing to throw away with the show. Somehow its uselessness seems the point, an abuse of interest. 

see too: Sanya Kantarovsky at Marc Foxx, Camille Blatrix at Wattis

Eleonore Koch at Modern Art

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An almost modernist press release - understated, distant - a life scraped, condensed.  And paintings like de Chirico meets Goodnight Moon - emptiness at twilight. Stilted. A world barren, devoid. In the absence of god we, painting, look to make things mean. Because the abyss is worse. Which these paintings dangle objects over - so latch onto them, find something to mean in them, because otherwise it's waste. 

The Wasteland: Gertrude Abercrombie at Karma, Alexandra Noel at Freedman Fitzpatrick, Atlantis, Adrian Morris at Galerie Neu

Paul Mpagi Sepuya at Modern Art hosting Team Gallery

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We call this "his exploration of the dynamics of intimacy." But here's the deal, this nudity rarely feels intimate; it is awkward, stiff, bodies look uncomfortable trying to bend a composition. The bodies work for the camera who is the master to be satiated. Which explains their machine-like affection. It's a more Hans-Breder-like photographic attitude, any sympathetic Tillmans-esque is fractured, the body formalized, turned to abstraction, which is a gore, a machine of equivocation, skin becomes fingerprinted glass becomes magazine flesh cut and pasted.  This is ostensibly fun but play and its dalliance gets close to frivolousness, becomes dangerous when you are machine shredding bodies.


See too: “Automatic Door” (Mark McKnight) at Park View / Paul Soto

Lois Dodd at Modern Art

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Plainness feels like the fresh air it ostensibly depicts. A lightness. More like drawing. These paintings would have been passé 10 years ago's theoretics and assemblage, but some anachronism has happened. The world, its viewing, is already surreal enough. Even the world feels strange, tender.

Yngve Holen at Modern Art

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Commodities made permanent. Are we to put some social science program toward this? some anthropology towards bronzed culture. The PR seems to think so: "one of the questions posed [...] is, what kind of concepts are introduced to the developing brains of children, and in what way does this guide their understanding of the world around them?" Art becomes (has become) a process for turning culture into artifacts of that culture, sediments of it, wiped across paintings and assemblaged in sculpture, like flypaper art collecting the carcass of. Preloaded with content for walltexts or children's television. Collectible too.
If the dominance of mass culture includes threat to diminish art that we could call castration, then art's turning that culture into a fetish item is classic Freud: "a token of triumph over the threat of castration and a protection against it." You can't cut off what I own of yours.


See too: Yngve Holen at Fine Arts, Sydney, Yngve Holen at Kunsthalle Basel, Yngve Holen at Modern Art, David Lieske at MUMOK,

Forrest Bess at Modern Art

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There's nothing worse than reading someone heaping praise on Bess, it doesn't work, the paintings deflect it like steel pans, which is why there's so much writing that resorts to retelling the life that was strange and mad and made for a script. The paintings just don't take it. Bess's paintings are artless, direct, and without affect. They are, as Bess stated, more diagrams than self-expression. He called himself a copyist, assuming a representational adherence to the forms. He thought New York Ab-Ex was overly affected: "He suspected that they thought him a hick, while he adopted a disparaging view of what he regarded as their stylistic conceits." Bess was styleless. Forms rarely repeat, each painting seems its own specific unit. Explicitly drawing something but not necessarily that we know what, we look at Bess's with all the perfect inscrutability of art, its search for meaning. A hurricane came through and blew away Bess's home late in his life and he was left to search through the Gulf's mud to find everything in it.


see too: Raoul De Keyser at Inverleith House, Gertrude Abercrombie at Karma

Jacqueline Humphries at Modern Art

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the more vulgar excesses of Humphries's paint always excused by its obliviousness to the demands of "making a painting." Humphries's almost without-composition but still composed, paintings like an accident, car or bed sheet. And these are readymade, the previous paintings reduxed with the latest deployment: ASCII printing. And so Humphries' drip, brushstroke, mark, neither expressive nor quotational of expression, paint is instead already perfectly dumb. This separates them from the hordes of zombies: no search for brains. Instead the cannibal-without-purpose seems pleasant after so many decades of painting's conceptual juicing. Like Richter whose painting exists in the netherworld of a stupid transcendence, instead just give us what we want, paint, flesh, dumbly.


see too: Jacqueline Humphries at Carnegie Museum of Art

Julien Nguyen at Modern Art

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carved with surgical precision, brandish the painterly like a sharp object. It lends a callousness to its images, figures, who, threatened by its scalpel, twist or elongate at the demands for painterly charisma. Like painting itself coerces the bodies into a marfan syndrome. One of Nguyen's closest counterparts might be Yuskavage overperformance of painting in colorful miasmas and overripe bodily distensions become here some masculine guile: doubling down on the biblical anachronism, stitching modern stylistics to old boards, a system for Nguyen to float brushwork as history unmoored and its ghosts redressed and cut up for today. Cartoon: Nail holes in flesh are instead rubies cut for symbols of blood, but there is none, no transubstantiation, only the artist's paint as the end game, bloodless, or this painting's aortic reds and blue chambers, like a diagram for heart.


See too: Lisa Yuskavage at Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis

Fiona Connor at Modern Art

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Mark, touch, history, transience, communication, all things the sign board sediments. As a newspaper's pages accumulate history, a condo's message board holds its neighborhood. There is lives, jobs, wants, wishes, desires attached to a board, fossils of a building accumulating the tacks of people's frontiers, the edges of their presence in the world, leaving notes to the chance of being happened upon, message in a bottle of dryland. Information display systems we find increasingly endearing.

Josh Kline at Modern Art

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Deploying the strategies of retail spaces, SFX, digital tech, political adverts, i.e. the corporate technologies that prove, with money, you can deform the world to your whim, mold plastic to your hand, replicant people in bags, get dream Obama to pass basic income. It's Magrittean dream-tech for the whatever you can buy sort. Now 3-D printing the apocalypse. Enemy or ally to its strategies, everyone wanted to Instagram Kline's militarized Teletubbies, proving them valid in an economy of attention, the high-production gloss of mass culture virtually demands it.


See too: Venice vs Triennial, Timur Si-Qin at Carl Kostyál

Susan Cianciolo at Modern Art

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Art is symptom of death's fear, and men erecting their "monuments," tumescence, to outlast them, the fear. Thus most art is cast iron, unwilling impermanence or loss. But so much humanity isn't iron, instead it is kept in acidic cardboard, gnawed at by the affection rifling through it. The word careworn. Knowledge is kept on rapidly acidifying papers, stored in databanks we anodize against oxidation in deep storage basements to feign permanence, our security. But the world slowly deteriorates, look into the issue of archiving, it's complex nuanced and impossible, it's baby blankets spilled on, barfed on, a biological archive cum box. Bankers boxes purchased by the gross. Your touch leaves a mark, sews a patch, you reproduce yourself in the objects you attend. Preciousness in warm cardboard, wearing touch, eroding to someone's love.

Ron Nagle at Modern Art

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The question of the body, in Nagle's as well as Price's, exists in the limbic state, between base impulses and the brain's higher orders' attempts to suppress it, the libidinous uprising of nether regions in seeing cream relax. Brown leaking out your chocolate bar, on the edge of your bedspread. Hard things and soft things. It's exceedingly risky, committing language to such ambiguousness, you sound like a perv while the tight-lipped get doubt's benefit; let the decorous attempt it, the tension of many a comedy artwork, and everyone in the gallery saying no I'm sorry you're mistaken it's not so much that the artist is off-gassing it's that his technological reliquary is valorizing but your interpretation is valid, sure. We say part erotic instead. Not, a sensuous candy loosening over pink erection, over swollen tongue, glossitis. And the other one with the tree, it looks fecal. The words that assign more meaning to us than the sculptures which reflect them.


See too: Torbjørn Rødland at Henie-Onstad Kunstsenter,  Torbjørn Rødland at Kunsthall Stavanger, Alice Tippit at Night Club

Ei Arakawa at Taka Ishii & Peter Halley at Modern Art

(Ei Arakawa at Taka Ishii, Peter Halley at Modern Art)

Arakawa's funneling of history into technologic codes (1959 Gutai represented on arduino Lite-Brite) isn't so interesting a metaphor for whatever societal technologic umbrella* as it is for artists use of history as content pre-legitimated, as a caricaturesque. And CAD's comparison to Halley here today is apt: expressionist rendered binary, computational, circuitry and cells. History reappears, history still shines through, but you get to exist as it. "Contemporary Art, a system in which the production of artistic meaning is itself made clear as a series of gestures and movements that encode work with whatever aura is distinct to contemporary art separate from the objects subsumed."


See too: “Room & Board & Crate & Barrel & Mother Vertical” at Midway Contemporary Art, Karl Holmqvist and Ei Arakawa at Overduin & Co.

*e.g. PR's "Furthermore, the digitalized and re-appropriated paintings question how our current digital condition and networked society influences the state of painting"

Nicolas Deshayes at Modern Art

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Like slick shit out a goose, the constipatory is loosed in intestinal forms as nausea spiraling waste flushed. Turds are the one sculpture everyone makes, hopefully on the daily, that no one likes to be reminded of. Nothing worse than being in a overheated bathroom unloading and sweating with overheated intestines, running hot water, thinking about tapeworms, trying to forget about your body.