Wolfgang Tillmans at Maureen Paley

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Perhaps what's at stake in the "blushes" is prettiness, an offhand nicety whose cheapness and disposability Tillmans weights against all the other offhand "cheap" snapshots of humans about their lives. Placing stake that you cannot dispose the saccharine abstraction without throwing out the people, humans. "If one thing matters, everything matters." And so they are like sunsets, both the near endless regurgitations of saccharine accident, cliche. Incidental returns of arbitrary conditions, completely unique and, like people, endlessly the same. A triple-point of beauty, arbitrariness, meaning. And perhaps meaning, our affection for the blushes, only appears as ward against inversion: If even one doesn't matter, nothing matters. Our fear.

Wolfgang Tillmans at Galerie Buchholz

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The promise of Tillmans' photographs is that maybe we too are living lives worthy of documentation if only our own humdrum was given the micro-attention of such a lovely eye, then we too could be seen, could be seen as worthy, placed on walls, actually be seen. It's a base human impulse, the need to be seen, recognized. Tillmans' eye fills with the promise of this possibility, of someone loving you no matter how banal, even the lowly ogre's onion, which is why all Tillmans' photographs seem to come pulled from a drawer in your parent's house and seeing yourself 30 years younger: the photos aren't great but they come with hammering benevolence attended to creatures we care for, a walloping nostalgia that Tillmans has found as immediate packaging: that the inherently elegiac medium also promises preservation of someone's sight of you.  Which is maybe why Tillman's always evokes comfortable denim, this base promise of finally of someone finally seeing you because your butt finally looks good packaged by the right hand and someone will love you.



Careworn: Susan Cianciolo at Modern Art

Wolfgang Tillmans at Daniel Buchholz

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Like well worn jeans we've gown comfortable in the softness of Tillmans, and so one would wish to find some sort of hard take to revitalize and refresh the practice, but one doesn't exist. Everyone loves Wolfgang. Tillman's activism was so couched in beauty and positivity as to be almost unremarkable, its seamy undercarriage was this trojan aspect, of looking fashionably pleasant while remaining avant in the subtle radicality taped up in constellations of subjects with a Tillmansesque grace that was unpretentious and gentle and modular, placable over a rotating set of subjects conjuring a loveliness almost overbearing, saccharine. But the rise of instagram with it the "small subject" that had seemed so radical then has become defacto as "unpretentious" photography is the ocean we tread weary, the artist having created the fashion that has come to obsolesce him, Tillmans will eventually amass a lifetime of them, these small moments, able to outpace the fashion.

Wolfgang Tillmans at David Zwirner, James Lee Byars at VeneKlasen/Werner,

Wolfgang Tillmans at David Zwirner

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Tillmans unanimously loved with a work just so friendly, empathetic, every frame softening its subject, Tillmans the great tenderizer, photographs in well worn softness like comfortable denim in its endless micro-sensitivity, a magisterial flow into the interstitial micro-politic of the personal as political. The cotton t-shirt, the fabric of our lives. Tillmans is intoxicating; affirming and empowering, imbuing the ordinary with nostalgia, our dreary lives with the hope of aesthetic empowerment. "NICKAS: It is documentation, because it documents the fantasy. TILLMANS: Yes."