SoiL Thornton at Kunstverein Bielefeld

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8 years ago CAWD noted that Darren's Bader's floor strewn with "regular objects" might be more interesting than art:

It would be more interesting to talk about many of these objects than it would most paintings in galleries today. Some of these objects are miraculous, a lot of the world is; who needs a painting, or worse, art.

It was true. And Bader was suicide bomb to the categorical dam of art, release the world into the gallery. Art had no defense.

[because] if we're going to take seriously the idea of [Carl Andre's] dead fire bricks arranged gravenly on floors, or [Michael Craig-Martin's] water become tree, then too so we must accept its ideological twin: shrimp tossed in a foosball table or muffins arranged. To argue one way or the other the importance of bricks/floor vs shrimp/game is to already enter into Bader's standoff, and lose to the man brilliantly willing to lose everything to win.

Like lucky quarters undifferentiated, Bader was willing to risk losing art into pile of ordinary objects it could barely be distinguished from - were it not the crowning halo of art accreditation, usually the oxymoron, certificate of authenticity. The merger of art and life was protected by legal documents. An unspoken sore point that Bader salted. Life was more interesting than art, and we defended art from it with notarized paper and a retrograde return to painting's definitive art-ness. 

Thornton OTOH seems to understand Bader's take - life's objects are more interesting than art's. But without wanting to suicide the category of art - and most importantly keeping art alive without necessarily a rebooting past genres. Everything here is neither sculpture nor readymade nor painting. It's like the world but also not the world at all. 

See too: Darren Bader, SoiL Thornton

SoiL Thornton at Essex Street

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Thornton seemed to have the insight that there are more interesting things than "painting," and that these things are (or can be assimilated with) painting, that painting is not the historical given. There is no "natural" painting but merely an inherited set of tropes that no one said you even have to play by. Rules to a game you didn't even realize existed. Kin say Richard Aldrich where almonds or pennies might be an equal painting axiom as Greenbergian "flatness".  Inflate a mattress, call it painting, it's not revolutionary except for the fact that no one else is on the same gameboard. 

A "befuddlement of the terms and conditions of paintings... obtuse, tangential starts digressing from those painting histories generally acceptable as beginnings. If the paintings seem facetious or frivolous it is because [x] doesn't necessarily [deem sacrosanct] the histories that are painting cannon..." Need not reinscribe them to reflect in them.

See too: Richard Aldrich at Gladstone Gallery, Darren Bader at Andrew Kreps

SoiL Thornton at Moran Bondaroff

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Enough amalgamation allowing for the collection of everything and yet remain free of its debt, reviewers throwing artistic forebears by the handful to see what sticks but Thornton's elision of names proper provides its greatest deftness, a balletic comedy of evasion, against being pinned down.  Dumb painting and its dogged ability to get the paint on the canvas as its own stubborn form of defense.

Schjeldahl, 1988: George Condo is one of the new dumb painters, adherents of a fashion bidding to be a tradition. [...] the latest hope in the painterly romance that flared a decade ago with Julian Schnabel and Sandro Chia and has since made dozens of names in the U.S. and Europe. The Romance is an infatuation with paint, distinct from any special use for it. The new dumb painters  of the 1980s are not necessarily unintelligent, but they are allergic to analysis. They bet that their own innocent pleasure in painting proves that painting (and they) will be immortal. [...] In its decadence, signaled by Picasso's terminal, self-imitating, dumb phase (mid-'40s onwards), one gets an elegance so second nature that the fiercest attempts to uglify it, by Dubuffet or by Picasso himself, merely amplify the tastiness. [...] That's the point: to show that painting has a primordial vitality as unkillable as cockroaches.