Caroline Mesquita at Centre d’art Contemporain Passerelle & PIVÔ

(CdCP, PIVÔ)

The carapace, hard upper, shingles, a shell, a roof, an exoskeleton, a home. Suggesting an interiority. A beneath, the inside, indoors, the soft pink innards you imagine. An igloo is crunchy on the outside and chewy on the inside. This would be the recurring theme. A suggestion of what's inside.

See too: Caroline Mesquita at T293, Caroline Mesquita at Kunsthalle Lissabon

Katinka Bock at Pivô

(link)

Installation art seems made for its own Rube Goldbergifition, attachments and strings, pulleys and hangings: the appliances for hanging become the art objects themselves. Why do we like Rube Goldberg machines and their absurdification of the device. Is it comedy? The world rendered caricature? There is an undercurrent of nihilism, of angst and cynicism toward technology, neutering mechanical complexity as childlike confabulation. An angst or nihilism that subtly pervades Bock's work. As the PR says, Bock "‘profanes’" the exhibition space, contorted into subtly absurd gestures. "Katinka Bock chose Avalanche as the title of an exhibition in a country where it never snows but which is on the verge of collapse, like so many others."  The exhibition, its context, Sao Paulo, the art, its function, is made into cartoon, a fantastical contraption, a comedy device replacing actuality, a fantasy which is easier to deal with.

AR: Puppies Puppies at BFA Boatos

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Originally Posted: February 28th, 2017

Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

Allison Katz at BFA Boatos



Yet another Painting Press acknowledging the persevering artist’s insistence of painting’s “possible field” in spite of its obsolescence. An irritating sentiment when one could instead irrigate the barren field, or harvest dirt, perhaps ground for pigments, however you want to use the metaphor before it changes to Painting is like an “overripe” fruit. Whatever painting is, its barren and unpalatable until you learn to like it. The acquired taste here is the awkward flat-footeded™ go-to in painting with meta-winking-nonsensical subject, a designer sensibility of outdated fashions, intentional international. I mean that Monkey painting is just awful, like something from a 70’s Tommy Bahama travel brochure, tiger-fur speedo on its way. A confabulation of sensibilities, cliches of 70’s colors in 90’s photoshop-neophism, everything lightly repugnant, repulsive, overwrought; Accruing a semblance of a thread through the passing motifs that surface, developing a topology, the adsoprtion of badpainting cop-out disaffection when you could ask the cops to leave, you’re an adult and this is your home, decorate it however.

Nick Mauss and Ken Okiishi at Mendes Wood DM



The Okiishi TV one of the most confounding artworks of the last number of years. So obvious, ham-handed, and bungled it’s difficult discerning whether miraculous or idiotic. Brilliant commodities that’s for sure and an Artsy page that’s “SOLD” out. Everyone somehow talking about chroma-keys, as if that mattered. For better or worse, if it wasn't fashionable Okiishi producing these, no one would care. Mauss and Okiishi’s desire for the possibility of new images seems deigned to expressing less a new image than the fetishistic desire inherent in images, a sexual teasing of images that of course leave you firmly blue-balled with cash in hand.
The spoons are an interesting nice gesture but feel more camouflage for the exhibition of last year's hot tickets sold once again.