Tom Allen at Chris Sharp Gallery

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Don't tell me that brick wall isn't about to embroider a sphincter, navel, fistula between. Perfumed sexual flora otherwise soured on anus. Don't let them fool you, that's a butthole. A Google deep dream of. Pants opening reveal. Don't let them tell you otherwise, don't let them be coy, saying the asshole-like-an-opinion is in you, everyone's got one, this one is yours, abating ruined meaning, its not true, that is a butthole, next to a flora, next to an entrance, in an opening, a cleft of meaning, and I'm telling you yours is this.

Tom Allen at Air de Paris

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...more Berghain than cottagecore - to paraphrase the press release. The pleasure here seems in twisting the dial to the humming point between saccharine pleasure and spoiled overripeness - between day and night - a painting your mother "likes" with uncertainty. Allen seems to find pleasure in this sweet spot hum.

Tastes change however, but let these be a marker of 2020s - that this was the edge, the waver between sickness and wealth. Painting as stakes planted, this was the limit. So if you start to love these, see how far we've moved.

See too: Tom Allen at Lulu

Tom Allen at Lulu

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Flowers after all are the lighted landing strips of insect air travel. The Vegas strip sign advertising sex and nectar to bees, birds. What did Zizek say about tulips, "an open invitation to all insects and bees, 'Come and screw me.'" Flowers perform better in the UV light of the sod's eyes. So paint them as such, in all their lurid arbitrariness. PR:"a maniacal inquiry into color, form and space."
CAWD earlier: "No one really certain why flowers are beautiful to humans... some believe in primeval human's use in marking where fruit would later be while others going so far to state flower's cross-species interest as evidence for an innate and low-level hardwiring of a concrete biological concept of beauty independent of any productivity. Marking food sounds truer. And perhaps this crass evolutionary productivity substantiating floral pulchritude might be why flowers are called "the lowest of the genres," gaming the system with hardwired desire. However what artist has ever been above cheating?"
Flowers are "an object as experimental-constant through which an artist may perform tortures on a cultural concept of beauty." Vegas; Zizek again: "I think that flowers should be forbidden to children."


See too: Willem de Rooij at Arnolfini, “Miranda” at Anat Ebgi & “A Change of Heart” at Hannah Hoffman,  Jenine Marsh at Lulu

“Symbolisms” at Cooper Cole

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Walls evaporate in backgrounds tuned to pornographic white, shadowless, paintings and sculptures float in the fog, as though tossed in the air, into the html space they drift, gallery neutrality moving ever closer to the anywhere/everywhere of globalized affairs. Galleries were the slow form of the internet: a networked system for image trade. CAD is the new silk road, the trade route of social fabrics. 

The "willfully retrograde" of gallery logistics, still shipping images across seas to see them sprout in back in the internet's ether, and of this exhibition's stated rose-colored eyes for a past long passed it, oddly, framed in the context of reactionary politics' goosechasing for a golden age, exemplified well in most of the work here. But the surrealist assimilation of Santiago de Paoli seem the most futuristic despite their decrepitude.