Chadwick Rantanen at STANDARD (OSLO)

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The PR opens with a scene of torture. And which, these are torturous objects. They are the cutoffs, the excess of standardized goods, the bits that exist because it is cheaper to produce excess and waste it than to produce exactly what is required. A quirk of capitalist efficiency, physical hiccups. They are waste, and this is upcycling from hell. This is trash into an agnostic crucifix, into a "devotional object," something the PR hints we may supplicate to... Which there is a read here that capitalism is religion (or god) and the waste is the new christ on the cross, sacrificed again and again for everyone's sins. But that smells bad - that's just appending symbology to make your fetish seem rational. Rantanen just seems to love torturing the stuf of capital. Pretend to asphyxiate it. These are a kink, and we don't shame for that.

See too: Chadwick Rantanen at Essex Street, “May the Bridges I Burn Light the Way” at STANDARD (OSLO), Chadwick Rantanen at Team (bungalow)

Sandra Vaka at Kunsthall Stavanger

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The world isn't so much a vampire as a system of straws attempting to drink one another's milkshake.

“Plains Ledger Drawings” at STANDARD (OSLO)

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The perspectival ambiguity of the homes/tents/forts aligning around the edge of the paper which acts as edge of its world, like a fisheye lens for god, turn the paper any orientation and this was still the center of the world. And look at that soldier's leg, the soldiers falling back akimbo, while the guy on the horse is central, static, strong, as if the rider doesn't move, as if the world moves around him. The tension between pictographs, information and depiction, stories to tell.

*Of course though painful that while these are traded under ironically white lighting, the US's native populations are still among its most vulnerable people.


See too: Purvis Young at James Fuentes

Mathew Cerletty at STANDARD (OSLO)

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It's like the closer it is to reproducing its sign that maybe reality starts to panic. Not necessarily the platonic forms, but, like, maybe. Painting feeling like objects smoothing into their icons, symbols, some sort of shorthand for reality which isn't it.
Appropriation by means of really really close, technical, representation. Which, Sturtevantily, negates it.

Kim Hiorthøy at STANDARD (OSLO)

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As if Jonas Wood made paintings of Matthew Brannon prints the candy lozenge would be complete, surface gelatinizing any object content, the tableaus we all find so collectiblely cute, holding their content with an ironic remove: we love nothing more than paintings of paintings. It is a clean, modernist-approved way, of looking at the filthy goo of representation.


See too: Matthew Brannon at Casey Kaplan, Jonas Wood at David Kordansky

Jaya Howey at STANDARD (OSLO)

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Howey painting about painter's mental health for some time, the last Bureau a painter crippled and frozen by his/our cage. "Music on headphones will be allowed further into the semester." Maximally untranscendent paintings. That they're even using paint, thickly, seems an ironic defeated gesture, attempting to regain the pleasure, or capital, of "painting" from things designed on screens, cut on plotters and pasted down before mindlessly spread with paint, the "painting" already finalized before paints even opened.

"Laughter is used as a defense mechanism used to guard against overwhelming anxiety. Laughter often diminishes the suffering associated with a traumatic event." "This nervous laughter is not true laughter, but an expression of tension and anxiety."

seems basically the way these work. Though the desire to not become entangled as therapist or sympathizer to Howey's plight would perhaps make the mistake that half of paintings from the last 200 years has been artists trying to toss their baggage onto your back. Rothko with a cold bucket of darkness for you to carry. We could provide some sort of talking cure, lay these paintings on the couch, endlessly expound a psychological profile, develop an emotional game-plan, and send them out the door better than they came in but then we wouldn't have Rothko. Anyway, Step 5. "Avoid anonymous, disembodied and profoundly hopeless forms of self-expression."

Matias Faldbakken at Astrup Fearnley Museet

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Do you recall, in the smoke of Matias Faldbakken's rocketship ascendancy the artworld was left blind scrambling to adhere a politic for it, to make a critical foundation for the artworld's hot new power iconography, unable to accept that how it looked, rather than any little content it contained, was its appeal. Who in that moment didn’t want have to their big fuck-all paintings and sell it too.  Objects representing the 101 ways to say "no." The ironic self-awareness of Faldbakken’s sculpture, like Fontaine, made its recycling of an already co-opted language acceptable, the viewer being smarter than the sculpture was a sales value added.  The comedy today: after such years of "negative expression" one is now looking any such ways to escape the bed one lain. "His artistic practice previously revolved around the concept of negation as it is expressed in avant-garde art and underground culture." 

Mathew Cerletty, Julia Rommel at STANDARD (OSLO)

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Boring at two ends of the value spectrum for painting today, meaning and object. At one end the object is valuable as a cultural emblem, painting, of historical accreditation, of a history of painting, and so Rommel makes the object structurally flaunt itself, give paint a stage upon which to display itself, paint, stripped and naked before us, and at the other end Cerletty's use of painting's cultural valuation for meaning turned into a puzzle game of clue boards of symbolist rubik's-cubeification, bright figures twisted and turned for you to puzzle over, man's search for meaning gamified on the board of painting.


See too: Mathew Cerletty at Office Baroque, Julia Rommel at Overduin & Co.

Josh Smith at STANDARD (OSLO)

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What was with our fetish then for exaggerated manufacture remains a question, for since we've grown tired of zombies that Smith and the gang had some hand spawning, Guyton, Walker, Price, a group for whom production was theme: recycling, automation, dispersion and Smith's prolificacy spamming himself into consciousness with grotesque versions to prove the mass, beating his name and himself in the head. That Smith is now making painting that are fine, pleasant even, a sort of radical gesture of normalcy, norm-core - aside from the PR excused "heavy handed" imagery - out-pleasanting even the most decorous of painters, the face of death even looking like the Scream.



See too: Ann Craven at Confort Moderne, Ida Ekblad at Herald St.

“May the Bridges I Burn Light the Way” at STANDARD (OSLO)

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Our growing attraction to garbage makes a psychologic sense as we become hostages to the trauma of dealing with it, the deranged images of garbage spewing, animals asphyxiated, learning of its intravenous networks sprawling across the landscape in unstoppable yet leaky pipes, garbage moved though our veins, beginning to see trash everywhere, even the paintings on view seem about the accumulation of detritus, cultural historic or otherwise, there's just stuff everywhere, stuff here a technical term for the quasi-differentiated mass, confusing a tarp, a trash bag and a tent.


See too: Chadwick Rantanen at Essex Street, Oscar Tuazon at Le Consortium & Paradise Garage

Michaela Meise at STANDARD (OSLO)

Meise's 15 years of reproduction of modernist tropes in awkward phrasings is, like Raoul de Keyser, its visual aberration:  Meise's (or de Keyser's) irregulairty forces a recognition of their having been a regularity, a system of rules to which these avoid conforming. Aside from visual interest, allowing inference to see why these wouldn't have been acceptable then and are of interest now. Like, placing the thing outside the circle allows the circle to be seen at all.


Raoul De Keyser at Inverleith House

Ann Cathrin November Høibo at STANDARD (OSLO)

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The compositionalizing effort. Arrange space to offset it, call attention to itself. The metal protrusions that highlight a body, like earrings, piercings or halo pinned to your skull. There's an erotic element to piercing, allowing someone that access to your body, to puncture it, the gallerist's giving to the artist. Like Krebber making explicit his hesitation in painting in order to highlight (to absurd levels) the artist's consciousness, composition in sculpture is a game to highlight the object in an askew flatness, the thought that went into it, so can't forget about that ghost.


See too: “Being Thing” at Centre International d’Arte et du Paysage & Treignac Projet

Fredrik Værslev at Bergen Kunsthall

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Continuously amazing, Josh Smith's ability to produce a tasteful painting today. And Værslev too an incommensurate tastifying of painting identities smoothed and well worn into comfort: the softness of acid-washed history, whose untreated denim is stiff, abrasive, and has edges that Værslev happily washes away, with the already pre-distressed historical material. Gerberian friend support is made as a kind of joke, of painting "off-the-shelf," readymade and there's a story Værslev tells in interviews, of the shelf origin in which in his final moments at the Städelschule, and tormented years since his last paintings -"for three years and a half I did not paint, not a single drop of paint" - and encouraged heavily by professor de Rooij, he makes a painting to his (Værslev's) mother's specifications: useful and pink with a shelf for her flowers to prevent stereo ruination and does so, paints the pink shelf with the flowers, and this success deemed by professor student and ostensibly mother seems an apt in describing its continuation today meeting demand for a market, giving the people what they want, a comfort.


See too: Fredrik Vaerslev at Centre d’Art Contemporain Passerelle

Sascha Braunig at Kunsthall Stavanger

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What is clear is that rendering's look itself has come to represent and stand in for our imaginative space and potential. The wet image absorbed the qualities of virtual space, the sheen of the digitally plastic denoting its manipulability. You see it in the ipad lushness of Orion Martin, the nervous sweat of Atkin's avatar's forehead, the gloss of Wolfson's images dirtied, the cartoon liquidity of Juliano-Villani, the paintings of Koons. Used to stress position the subject/object delineation. The importance of iconographies for many of these people is evidence of our growing identification with icons as subjects themselves come to represent us and open to torture.


See too: Sascha Braunig at Rodolphe Janssen, “Puddle, pothole, portal” at Sculpture Center, Erwin Wurm at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg

Judith Bernstein at Kunsthall Stavanger

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The conceptual cymbal crash, punning cocks with screw, was defeatist humor mocking not just the male tool but deflating the hard language of conceptual art: telling the joke over and over again on larger and larger sheets of paper, the high rhetoric of big egos reduced to a bad joke - Cue: Beyonce "♪♫ Cause he's got a big 'ego.' ♪♫" Bernstein: "it wasn’t funny." 



See too: Judith Bernstein at Mary Boone

James Hoff at VI, VII

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We need a word for something.
Let's make a fictional example, an artist, let's say this fictional artist is named Lucien Smith.
Lucien Smith makes paintings with a fire-extinguisher. This is called "process based abstraction." But if Lucien Smith had made paintings with fire extinguishers pulled from the wreckage of an art warehouse burned to the ground with so much of Saatchi's art within it, these fire extinguishers unused and thus a testament to dashed hopes of prevention and ready for Smith's painting well then, he'd really have something wouldn't he. This value added of anecdotal content, of reference converted to sign and emblazoned on painting, this.
While this was the central conundrum to conceptual art since its inception, the rupture and distance between sign and object (always at risk that its sign didn't actually contain its object) it has since been taken as granted, as a granting agency for value added. While On Kawara's July 21st 1969 poses the question of whether it actually contains the weight of a moon landing, the paint sprayed is given to absorb the history. If an artist goes into the woods and there is no cellphone service around to hear him, does it imbue itself into the copper objects as significant?  Jason Rhoades built a career of mocking this value-added system, performing it under absurdly comical conditions, to create his referentially seminal signature: PeaRoeFoam, a mess of so much reference and history and jest that it self imploded. Or Seinfeldized by Arcangel.
So a word for this value-added process based absorption/valorization of reference.


See too: On Kawara at the Guggenheim , Simon Starling at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago

Nancy Lupo at 1857

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Rubbermaid's BRUTE® UTILITY containers are pervasive. And the containers at first seem, ominously, to lack any qualities whatsoever, but Lupo, different from Bill Bollinger's formalized mass materials, draws out the latent, systematically mocking its soft qualities, the infantilizing soft curvature, the flesh of it. Objects humans draw for ourselves are getting bodily, begin to resemble ourselves, as erotics and curvature seep into everything, and these look not much different from baby toys, from chew toys.

Goutam Ghosh at STANDARD (OSLO)

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Today’s PR asks the same questions as Raspet’s exhibition yesterday:  At what point is phenomenology or perception able to be described and codified by science’s formula for its reality. The key line here: “The spectrographer uses an instrument that separates light into a frequency spectrum and records the signal using a camera, whereas the jyotshi would first acknowledge the sensation of light then study how the perception of that would affect the behaviour of his body mind.” Raspet is the spectrographer, Ghosh the Jyotshi.  Science quick to label Jyotsh pseudoscience, but the question here is particularly pertinent: That though the two Cokes are scientific equivalents (in yesterday’s case its mirror), would they perform the same in the Pepsi Challenge? That a placebo pill, even when known as a placebo, proven again and again to be effective, can’t be called a placebo anymore. That for all science’s power through its highly choreographed means of removing human perception from its experimental evidence, has finally found itself at its strange liminal boundary where perception, so long skewered as the false facade to an objective reality, has become the reality now to be tested, and without good means to do so. Raspet the skeptic, Ghosh the agnostic. And so the paintings.

See too : Sean Raspet at Société

Torbjørn Rødland at Henie-Onstad Kunstsenter

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The more overtly erotic of Rødland's tinge the others with innuendo, a suspicious perfume, making even chaste photographs fill with “content,” engorge on ripeness of its meaning. Touch, of all kinds, becomes charged with the sex of the inert.
As with Ethridge, the erotic exists in the uncomfortable voids that fashion photography - that it often looks like - lapses, the spaces that don’t fit into normalized categories, between normative systems, yet becoming. Filling an image with too much content, it becomes erotic, engorged, lacking the blank homogeneity of Movie Star beauty, and confusing the two with slightness - the deckled face of a girl, the black banana - posing problems for categorical restrictors like the MPAA for which Rødland presents a real European nightmare of divergent cultural normativity. Most of the photos are G or PG but feel PG-13, and while the penis is R it’s the sneakers on the otherwise nude man that really require Parental Guidance, gorge yourself upon them.


See too : Torbjørn Rødland at Kunstahall Stavanger , Lucy Skaer at Murray Guy , Sherrie Levine at Simon Lee

Will Benedict at Bergen Kunsthall

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The new method of artistic identity production, vacant-token-products for the gallery leaving the unsaleable cultural-capital building for the museums. Benedict has always been, like Kanye, a wonderful producer woefully lacking in “content.” Instead the arrangements are based on the formal material massaged in the medium of the network, buoys in the flow. Though Yeezus was great.

And Benedict's turn towards video production gives the most interesting results, yet the temptation to connect Benedict’s passé part-outs to the subliminal-abjection of the anti-adverts - both creating a fragmented disgust - would miss how sick-sweet repulsiveness of Fried Chicken and KFC commercials is premised on their physiological allure set against a much deeper horror. Benedict’s are closer to the phenomenon of trypophobia, a socially spread internet “fear,” presenting a study of whether it actually premised off a biological response or a form of social inclusion

See too: Will Benedict at Balice Hertling