Sean Landers at Le Consortium

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A joke can only be told so many time. "A joke is spent and exhausted. So an artwork - with its requisite implicit promise of eternalness - can't really make a joke without implying that it too will one day be depleted. [Richard] Prince's real joke is that the paintings keep telling the same joke for years and years stupidly." Like a painting. And Landers finds a similar interest in defeat, once the comedy is depleted you have reckon with what remains. Which, what remains?


See too: Sean Landers at Rodolphe Janssen, Sean Landers at Friedrich Petzel

Sean Landers at Rodolphe Janssen

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We identify with cuteness, with the interminable wet-eyed critters of Disney, Pokemon, whatever latest commodified and neotenic rodent. Cuteness' pressure causing Pugs' eyes to bulge and esophagus to choke. (The stunted bone structure of Pikachu leaves him in constant pain.) And Landers' plaid animals, sad clowns, and now a pinocchio "plankboy" are the means of a lesser sort of identification. Landers' characters are not focus-group perfected. And their revulsion is "an effect of anticlimax created by an unintentional lapse in mood from the sublime to the trivial or ridiculous." Like Greek mythos for a plankboy or Moby Dick in flannel. The definition of bathos. Which Landers prances sad clown around. Landers paintings "arousing pity, especially through vulnerability or sadness," pathetic.


See too: Sean Landers at Friedrich Petzel

Sean Landers at Friedrich Petzel



Landers’ aborted-before-conceived humor is continually resuscitated by the artist’s writings - here etched in the paintings themselves at the bottom of the ocean - imbuing a pathos into the not quite fully gestated juvenalia, asking to be excused for mistakes made in teenage exuberance of dealing with art in the eternal sense, becoming all so stupid and pathetic as to become endearing, like all John Candy’s exasperatingly aloof characters who in the film/gallery's third act find him asking directly and pathetically for forgiveness to found-families for the idotic-yet-winning obliviousness, as a whale wearing flannel about to go down, here an Uncle Buck kept on life-support to achieve immortality as a joke.