Quentin James McCaffrey at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery

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The mystery of Vermeer is that the paintings see everything and look at nothing, the affect is a staring-through, at a point beyond the painting. A that paint only rims the glass of some void. This surely the effect of the photographic ground which is indifferent to the demands of painter/painting. Because the camera is stupid, doesn't care for subject, is uncanny. (A camera's alienation we have grown acclimated to, and it takes a painting to reproduce the effect. This is similar Cerletty's virtual, an anonymizing viewpoint.)

The point being these literalize Vermeer's void, concretely remove the subject to hammer home the point of vacuous non-subject, an everything-but. Subject is replaced with mirrors, glints of light, with air. Instead searching for it. This makes mystery.

See too: "Colonel Rublev in the museum with a candlestick, paintings mechanization of mystery", Mathew Cerletty, Gertrude Abercrombie at Karma

Alan Reid at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery

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Painting converts to information, into design. Into sign systems. We no longer paint landscapes we paint the superhighway of adverts. This makes sense. We look at more iPads than we do trees. The iPad is more meaningful than a tree. We relate to the world as icons, fonts, swipes - this the grammar of our meaning. "We understand them implicitly, terrifyingly." And these prose poem.

informative painting: Math Bass

Eleanor Ray Nicelle Beauchene, New York

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Painting some lost air in the "middle distance" - air infected with some ghost. A Tuymans' photograph falls toward unfocus, like lenses shifted, or just before you faint. A world though some kind of frost. The old wavy glass of Morandi's subjectivity but mictrotized, etched, woozy. Afflicted with heatstroke? A heat shimmer. Even the cold landscapes have humid hot air. The edges are liquid hard, but their interior a gooey center. And melting. Corot's plein air as locked up as a Maureen Gallace summer, seen through Morandi's glass and receding.

Alice Tippit at Nicelle Beauchene

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Ambiguity becomes the new force, rupturing our ability for exchangeable shared common experience, unsure whether you see a penis or if that’s just... So we get quiet. “What do you see” becomes a loaded question. The schoolgroup is led elsewhere. Nudity we can bear, it’s natural, but here the penis may be inside your head. The big red thing was a sunset always.

see too: Alice Tippit at Night Club

Shana Sharp at Nicelle Beauchene

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Happening at Chris Sharp's Lulu was quaint, perhaps charming, endearing. It's a lovely gift, to give your mother an international art career. This feels different. Beauchene does actually show other artists besides Lulu family, they just rarely show up on CAD (4 in 5? (depends how you count)). So the layers here are complicated, enlarged by our magnifying glass to show this one texture. And charges of nepotism would of course be met with all other, more closeted, forms of nepotism that pretty much structure the art world. Transparency could feel like fresh air. Instead this weird magnifying glass.

Kate Newby, Daniel Rios Rodriguez at Nicelle Beauchene

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Both's attention to naturalism, to the brown you may have noticed in stores having enveloped our packaging to stand for its green, the ecological concern signified by "brown." And "Natural" you may also have noticed has no FDA governance and can be, without recourse, stated about things like gasoline and high-fructose corn syrup, maybe steel nails. Natural, like nature, creates a negative distinction, we are said to go out "into nature" to pretend we are distinct from it, to pretend there worlds distinct from mankind. Like the trend in homes, bars, everyone hauling reclaimed wood by the tonnage deep into the city, West Elm mass producing it, in attempt to reclaim some authentic experience separate from the glass we touch all day in pocket. But the glass like the gallery can bring us anything, it appears on screen, in white fields, in front of you, your touch of nature, your finger grease smeared on it.


Kate Newby at Kunsthalle Wien, Daniel Rios Rodriguez at Lulu, N. Dash at Casey Kaplan