Caitlin Keogh at Overduin & Co.

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What can a tornado mean? How does it speak, catapulting whole neighborhoods into the air. A house blown up, again. How many times can you explode the house, the archive, mailbox, fenceposts, Greg, displayed, waving though the air, help. They continue beyond the frame! What can a Tornado mean by this? This is the fallout of Rachel Harrison semiotic explosion. The settling dust of nonsense. This is meaning aloft, in midair, the detritus of whatever art recently smart bombed. The airline wreckage cataloging its hangar. The little stick and poke tattoos glistening on your body. This face of Post Malone. A pox, outward flush of signs. He's got a case of the semiotics. He's got a pox of the interpretability. The illustration is clear.. but the meaning, whoa, wait till you get a load of the meaning. It's everywhere. The point is to make it look like a Clue board, to make the game is meaning. The loser is the first person to say "pipe."

Poppy Jones at Overduin & Co.

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The receding sign, withdrawal, threatening loss, like paintings in the rain. 🥺 sad. "art often feels like a process, technology, for imprinting nostalgia. Casting banality in bronze, silver, with a halo of rose. " The Sontagian elegy of photographs as an Instagram filter. "preserves your recognition like pickled pigs and call it romantic." Pre-attaching its loss, you can almost print it. Nostalgia turning into an industry for creating it. 

see too: Moyra Davey, Peter Hujar at Galerie Buchholz

Ei Arakawa at Overduin & Co.

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Assembles references as a series of gestures - not quite gathered but shrugged towards. A sort of breeze of its symbols, a perfume of content. The most interesting thing in Arakawa is the ability to be about something without saying quite anything about it. Parental painting turned to digital displays. Content exhumed and glitzed. Quote books. An "opera." A breeze. What is to be learned here is the ability to treat content with the lightest touch, to barely use it, to just sorta let it lift itself barely into air. 

Eliza Douglas at Overduin & Co. and Tina Braegger at Friends Indeed

(Overduin, Friends)

Perform our little tortures of cultures. Twisting its nipples to make it say uncle, make it "speak." This stands for criticality. A corpse forced to dance with all the electricity of abstraction. Take culture, give it a little stir. This is our auto-ritual. This is how we make it "mean." Stand in for meaning. These aren't paintings of the t-shirts, these are the t-shirts. 

See too:Eliza Douglas at Overduin & Co., Eliza Douglas at Air de Paris, “No Joke” at Milieu

Caitlin Keogh at Overduin & Co.

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Clue board games. Painting converted to iOS, and graphical icons to redistribute sense. Building interfaces for interpretation that is abyssal, sinking. Art seems doomed to be particularly suggestive tarot cards. 

Jeanette Mundt at Overduin & Co.

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Of gymnasts, the paintings lack their subject's deftness. Motion is given to a square smear. Instead Mundt's exude something permanently flat, dry. A relation to their subject is ambivalent despite their load. Mundt often targets content that is full of juice, yet is left on canvas to fall apart. A gap that reviewers seem unable to fill with their own: Travis Diehl seemed to conjure the process of glaucoma's blindness; Tess Edmonson said about the film on which a painting was based: "the gallerist warned me not to watch it"; and Zoë Lescaze aptly called it "ready for viewers and critics to plot their opinions onto her body." Her body of work which fails to deliver on the subject. Failure isn't an interesting painting strategy in 2019 - we did that ten years ago -  but maybe a generous read is that these aren't so much failing as crumpling, like car hitting its subject.

Eliza Douglas at Overduin & Co.

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Not so interesting perhaps from a PierreMenard/Sturtevantian vantage (the whole tongue louse, deterritorial author theft well trod), but maybe as a continuation of Douglas' clever ideas for coating painting in a candy shell, creating frames that exist as excuses for painting. Like before's hands which cast spells for some sloppy "painterly moment." They feel sorta cheap (it would not be the first time the artist has ordered paintings from China) and that seems too, the point, like Smith's lame name, a mere means to fill an exhibition.

In late 2014, hearing that many schools in Europe were free, she called a friend who had gone to the Städelschule in Frankfurt—one of the top art schools in the world, with a reputation for fostering experimental work. She set up a Skype date with a professor, painter Willem de Rooij. Then, with two weeks to go before the meeting, she got to work. 

Douglas began painting abstract forms on random objects around her house—aluminum foil, found images, a set of Batman bed sheets—and photographed the results. She reproduced the images on small canvases using the kind of print-on-demand machines you find at CVS and Walmart, then painted over them again. 

“I thought it was a good way to get a lot of decent-looking stuff made really quickly,” Douglas says now. “I was thinking about how I might be able to get him to think that I was doing something more elaborate than what I really was.” -Taylor Dafoe, artnet

Oliver Payne at Overduin & Co.

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Payne' treats ideas as objects that can be held, manipulated, attached. Each object illustrative of a concept. The PR's Miller's Law, you can hold all seven in your head and juggle them if you like. The main theme of them is macro to the individual to the commons, swarm intelligence and so on and so forth. This like Conceptual Art itself where objects become representations of concepts, where objects are not individuated things governed by a rule set and thus exchangeable. The opposite of the object oriented oncologists. Not the drawing on the wall but the instructions which allow it to be placed.  Certificates of authenticity governed by critical mass of belief, and bitcoinian Blockchain. Watch the one man rave. The singular object becomes representative of the concept and manifests the commons, the Dance Party. The psychoactive element is seeing the singular and knowing it as concept, manifesting the dance party without it being one, the thing as only a representation of concept, Platonic Psychosis.

There's another Miller's law, oddly of the same Miller:

It instructs us to suspend judgment about what someone is saying so we can first understand them without imbuing their message with our own personal interpretations.

The law states: "To understand what another person is saying, you must assume that it is true and try to imagine what it could be true of."

See too: Nina Beier at Croy Nielsen, Darren Bader at Radio Athènes

Erika Vogt at Overduin & Co.

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Big objects mock us. They hystericize space by treating it as plastic, irrationally. And their lumpy forms remind us of our bodies, which makes their injustice to the general order of space a personal issue, taking up space that was, ostensibly, meant for us with a big cartoonish grin. They are weapons. As theater props and staged here they are meant to have a relation to your body.

See too: “Puddle, pothole, portal” at Sculpture Center, Amanda Ross-Ho at The Pit

Julia Rommel at Overduin & Co.

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A system of indexes parading painting's material as flesh flaunted, the overt material presence is at the same time excused by the "accidental," the means of composition providing reason for the material to be there, i.e. they're artifacts of a process so we're not reading into the color field emotions of the capital P Painter (of say Marden, Diebenkorn, Rothko) but as the residuals of painting's means which provides relief from capital M Meaning (Parino, Hesse), the great relief of things just being, or trying their hardest to.

see too:Lucy Skaer at Murray Guy, Daniel Lefcourt at Blum & Poe, Alicja Kwade at Kunstmuseum St. Gallen

Will Benedict at Overduin & Co.

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Thinking of Benedict like a gothicly depressed Baldessari is helpful. A formal artist using the basic propositions of art against itself, in the wrong, that if, like Baldessari, the text must relate, when in semio haywire it does not, its semantic slippage disconnects us. While Baldessari's rupture produced laughter in art's children, Benedict's continual unplugging of content creates morose vacuum: when Benedict, as early on, is funny, it is easy to take, but when it, as he continually more and more aims to depict culture as, is decidedly empty it creates a resignation to its abuse, a feeling of learned helplessness in rats, of numbness, feeling like viral conditions speaking through stuffed nasal sinuses, stuffed up, comparison leading violence.

John Baldessari at Marian Goodman, Will Benedict at Bortolami

Karl Holmqvist and Ei Arakawa at Overduin & Co.

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At his Bard MFA Arakawa created and ran a bar in the concrete center of the summer program already known for parties, a means of reifying the all important social relations of schools and friends to its site of exchange, and in the several hundred exhibitions since Arakawa’s Friendibitions have become a means of rapidly dispersing the self into a ballyhooed network, burying the author for the friends he can raise. Holmqvists interest in redundancy and quasi-childlike carefree fit almost too well with with Arakawa’s quasi-spirituality and redundant-idealism exposing the bedrock of its child-like unstoppability, that like equating Bucky-balls (the most art over-referenced object of all time) to a Childhood playgrounds as well the mountainous Dolly Parton Nuclear Plant, its less about the objects themselves and more about just getting it filled with everyone linked in.


See too : Ben Shumacher at Bortolami , Stefan Tcherepnin at Freedman Fitzpatrick.html , Will Benedict at Bergen Kunsthalle

“Seven Reeds” at Overduin & Co.

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As others have extrapolated, Kassay’s silver market stardom was, in the style of ancient plated mirrors, an object of vanity for the rich, giving them back exactly what was loved most, their surroundings, their homes, their empire and visage. To prove the point the more well silvered even reached higher prices. The theory serves as a parable to distinguish the vanity of the rich from the more philosophically noble raisons of the art world, and that Kassay’s shift to monochromes, however derivative, was a welcome advancement past vain ideals.
Yet the monochrome itself is a flattery of the viewer. In its minimalist mode it highlights the theater of its surrounding, as Fried described minimalism almost half a century ago:

“theatrical because, to begin with, it is concerned with the actual circumstances in which the beholder encounters literalist work. Morris makes this explicit. Whereas in previous art ‘what is to be had from the work is located strictly within [it],’ the experience of literalist art is of an object in a situation - one that, virtually by definition, includes the beholder.”

Or to quote the infamous monochrome brand of Codax: “ another aspect of monochrome paintings is that they function somewhat like a mirror. They are essentially blanks. With little evidence of the hand that made them, it’s harder to attribute subjectivity to them than with most other art, so people are confronted with themselves a bit more.”
That monochrome or minimalist modes are themselves a vanity object, in which the viewer is flattered for all the intelligence that they can project into the blank objects. Serving to imbue their surrounding, gallery or living spaces with the auratic privilege of “art.” Lacking even Imi Knoebel’s color-content, the works drabness serves to disperse content and reinforce it as its surroundings, its space and viewer on the stage before it, like totems of whatever ideals they allow to be contained. That so much gentle painting today rather than a production of content, merely acts as directives for the flow of content and persons that come to it, trickling through it.

See too: Merlin Carpenter at Overduin & Co.

Merlin Carpenter at Overduin & Co.



Has a more vacuous flaccid and dead show ever been done? An exhibition so empty it's like looking at ocean’s abyss. Carpenter has always been capable of the self-flagellating gesture, but this, this is like selling your flesh to pay the guy who owns your soul for its postage to hell, and you’re walking around bleeding without a shirt. This show makes Zobernig look like an academic painter. Codax like he paints Sundays. Makes Anton Chigurh look like he’s only out for a walk. If I could afford one of these I would buy Cobain’s face to hang in my bedroom, to wake up everyday and be reminded of the limitless capacity for emptiness of the human soul. Carpenter you old dog. Even though there’s nothing to look at I find myself scrolling through the images again and again, looking at the void. There’s almost a sort of pathos. Is this what it felt like to originally look at a Warhol in the 60’s? Maybe some sort of adrenalized version for post-Sturtevant times.  This show is chilling.