Oliver Osborne at Francis Irv

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Osborne doubling down on his matte representation, its dry scumbled until dusty. Yellow paint like grandma's, you need a Claritin for it. "[Richard] Prince's real joke is that the paintings keep telling the same joke for years and years stupidly." Our most famous sans-comedy. Repetition, run into the ground begets something else. A non. A fading. Dry humor to dust. Reboots? Maybe just lovely dust. A new nostalgia.

See too: "Artisanal Old-timey rendering, wrapping its cold surface in warm wool."

Oliver Osborne at Tanya Leighton

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The Symbol. Archaic and X-rayed. Dressed and redressed. What could it mean, this puzzification. A clue is presented, then tortured, wrung for information, why won't painting tell us, why, speak dammit. 

Oliver Osborne at Peles Empire (Matte Representation)

The new school of Matte Representation, scumbled opaque facades:  

Clockwise from top left: Oliver Osborne, Nolan Simon, Caleb Considine, Jennifer J. Lee

Paint like suede. Leather, rubbed, treated. The point is the [soft opaque] surface, a shallow pool both lets sight in and reflects us. A plane to project on. Have you touched a movie screen, they're like this. Silver, and we can theorize an internality, a subject inside, however privy we are not to it. A surface that warbles in little blots scumbled. What do you see, what do you project. It's a new type of formalism where content is created then made an aside, rejected, cancelled by the imbroglio of meaning. A representation that is tampered, we stare at.

"This sense of content being astray has to do also with the process’ vying for significance."

Call the exhibition Clue. The puzzles of today's painting in which their individuated flat symbols present a real mystery of a subject. Looking like de Chirico designed a board game. Soviet Realism for the icon age, new devotional painting. Colonel Rublev in the museum with a candlestick.

In our time textures are of utmost importance in creating realistic digital worlds. Objects are surface to be texture-mapped, painted, [artist]'s micro-attention to the variants of matte diffuse surface (something digital rendering has difficulty with) and scattered specular speaks to the digital by deploying what it cannot. Artisanal Old-timey rendering, wrapping its cold surface in warm wool.

Read more:

Caleb Considine at Massimo de Carlo, Oliver Osborne at Gió Marconi, Nolan Simon at What Pipeline, Caleb Considine at Daniel Buchholz,

Oliver Osborne at Gió Marconi

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Paint like burnished leather. Rubbed, treated. The point is the surface, a shallow pool both lets sight in and reflects us. We can theorize an internality, a subject inside, however privy we are not to it. A surface that warbles in inkblots. A "parsimonious difference." What do you see, what do you project. It's a new type of formalism where content is created then rejected, cancelled by the imbroglio of meaning. A depiction tampered, we stare at. 


See too: Caleb Considine at Massimo de Carlo