Sophie von Hellermann at Space K

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We don't give Laura Owens enough credit for accrediting candy as painting. For being the candy that painting is. No one is interested in the narratives, they're interested in paint. History is the framework that excuses its cotton candy rendition. Like a World War 2 movie whose entire purpose is to let Brad Pit kill nazis. We want to see cartoonish evil be triumphed. We want big juicy painting winning. We want cartoons, juicy. 

see too: "The painterly requires an object for the brush to caress." "We want the painterly because this is painting's bright jewel - the more painterly it is the more undeniably painting it is, tautologically as symbol. In times of crisis we seek comfort in the familiar - put our money in what's safe. Is this why impressionism is coming back?"

Hend Samir at Real Pain & Sophie von Hellermann at Larsen Warner

(Real Pain, Larsen Warner)

..trends for a sort of hyper-liquidity - hyperbole of the painterly... exaggerated to jest. ...the painterly involves a framework, a subject that bleeds. The painterly requires an object for the brush to caress. 

"Because it seems what we are actually pushing around on the canvas is the cultural object of painting. The canvas, support, oils, were long ago replaced by this mythos, its signifiers, significance."

("Paint becomes simply the candied shell to painting's cultural myth. ..Drawing ripples in surface to activate the beneath, tap the vast depths of painting's cultural wealth, this the watermelon.")

We want the painterly because this is painting's bright jewel - the more painterly it is the more undeniably painting it is, tautologically as symbol. In times of crisis we seek comfort in the familiar - put our money in what's safe. Is this why impressionism is coming back? When painting tends towards its hyperbolization - the ability to be more painterly, more Painting. We see time move in reverse, is this already impressionism?

See too: "Back to the Future impressionism" Genieve Figgis at Almine Rech, Ambera Wellmann at Lulu, Nicola Tyson at Friedrich Petzel, Nicola Tyson at Nathalie Obadia, "Watermelon Theory" Tala Madani

Sophie von Hellermann at Greene Naftali

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Throughout the cotton-candy scuzz our attempts to make out images ambiguous leaves what?  We look through the paint at some cloudy apparitions like a Renoir got wet, left in the rain. For all their candy von Hellerman's aren't all that appetizing; Suzanne Hudson called their characters etiolated, plants grown leggy in darkness, a feeling of being deprived of crucial nutrients, teeth-shakingly saccharine, you can almost feel how sticky.


link: Joanne Greenbaum at Crone,

Sophie von Hellermann at Office Baroque

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Such softness, it's abject. Saccharine. Like walking around with cotton candy between toes, sugary resolve to true grit. Till your teeth fall out your head. But their softness something of a ruse, a narrative lacking definition. So that the man who looks like burnt matchsticks and the angel who provides his splayed toe ecstasy in an embrace too ambiguous for the smile he beams. Everything we see in the paintings based on expectation, that we recognize an angel at all.  Low resolution.