Michaela Eichwald at dépendance

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We've all grown tired of our stomachs pumped for the lumpy biomorphics that pox contemporary art. But Eichwald at least willing to risk the true browns that those otherwise glossy ceramics cheerily self-sweeten with candy coating. Eichwald threatens actual excess, dribbles that could still stain, or, like graffiti, are already stained, vandalized. Which Eichwald's do feel, vandalized - graffiti's defecated signatures - that pink one scratched into with like a school desk's attempted Baphomet that comes out more as a hairy devil with tits, not really satanic at all. Because the acne poxed kid's hard desire for satanism outshines his ability to actually conjure it. This is endearing. And there's a joke in here about teenage bedsheets too, but both failed satan and besotted sheets are of that teenage libidinal excess that has a tendency to spill, run over, an excess energies that stain things. Teenagers stain things.

Gillian Carnegie at dépendance

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A sort of carving Euan Euglow by way of Vilhelm Hammershøi, an Arrangement in Grey and Black the number one thing is the references we could pile upon these. Peppered with Sphinxes whose riddle must be answered, painting. And us all tossing darts at meaning. Carnegie's slow career to worlds with no light, almost shadowless worlds reticent, seen in distant silver. All those butts and suns previous and no one makes a Bataille joke. Two reviews from the time instead horrifically conclude with allusions to the artist being "in the mood," the other having "the arrogance of a girl; one who knows how to get you off, when to put out and when not." No wonder Carnegie went indoors, away from the light's "ignoble shaft" "the indecency of the solar ray." Instead something mercurial, resistant to hands, and thus why all the writing on Carnegie is pretty much awful, this. Simon Thompson's letter at least refuses to attempt manhandling the situation, with and not at. If what Mayweather did was easy, all boxers would do it. Withdraw as a form of iconoclasm, luminous in rejection. How annoying to wither, die, under the mockery of a cat's impassion.


See too: Luc Tuymans at David Zwirner, Thomas Eggerer at Richard Telles, Caleb Considine at Daniel Buchholz, Caleb Considine at Massimo de Carlo, Venice: Victor Man at The Central Pavilion

Thomas Bayrle at dépendance

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Despite the feast, there's nothing particularly pleasant on looking at them, reminiscent not only of the increasing cultural maximization - wringing efficiency from every nook - but spatial nightmare as a child the monsters of unascertainable depth, distance, both near and far, like videos zooming out of fractals running only makes them reappear closer, again. Apart from all the juicing of metonymy or synecdoche, Bayrle's invoke a sort of fordist seasickness, a vertigo of the cartoon and our bodies and converted to hours, sign, symbol, stuf, window dressing. We are, simply, made into an abstraction, and a curatorial idea: a show called like Virtual/Vertigo or whatever daffy offering, about our now untethered freefloat in planes and scale lost as design replaces subject, populations standing in for people, traffic for car: Bayrle, Amanda Ross-Ho, Daniel Pflumm, Mathis Altmann,  Alberto Giacometti, all the submersive video-nauts, etc etc et al, space lost.


see too: Daniel Pflumm at 6817 Melrose, Amanda Ross-Ho at The Pit, Amanda Ross-Ho at The Approach, Mathis Altmann at Halle für Kunst Lüneburg, Mathis Altmann at Freedman Fitzpatrick, Gina Folly at Ermes-Ermes, “Sylvanian Families Biennial 2017” at XYZ collective

“J A N U A R Y” at dépendance

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Paintings we bruise to reestablish some body, flesh, into the cartoon that has become pervasive, some hematoma between the lines inked to delineate ourselves. We don't want to be cartoons. Our bodies, paintings, can't take hammers like a liquid cat can.

Ed Atkins at dépendance

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"Members." A constituent, "a person, animal, or plant belonging to a particular group." or a "a part or organ of the body, especially a limb." Or, say, dismembered, cropped. Clip you like foreskins or fingernails, or your fingers, your legs under artistic amputation. But you can also be euphemized, your body metaphorized out from under you. As an innuendo, mistake your lumps for a phallus, say call you a dickhead, make you look like a member.  We could turn you into a statistic, a cancer rate.  We could say he is nice. We could make you into a joke.

Jana Euler at dépendance

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Has your consumption of news increased dramatically, nauseatingly, in the past year? Feeling bloated at its high volume low satisfaction? has the act of reading the new begun feeling like eating literal newspaper? If Euler "attempts mirroring our contemporary conditions" and " the figures in the paintings act as a metaphor to emphasize the failed power of an individual to accommodate the current rise of technology." it's because Euler's paintings feel like eating the news, both it and Euler's paintings like a just opened lid and staring into the bait to unpack the whole, pulling one referential string and the whole thing deluges like clowns out of cars, only guessing at the number of clowns in the office. How insane it all feels, how microtized to the wind. The thread pulls endlessly, and the sweater never comes. The images today will read different tomorrow. The pace of the snail, has it changed or is the view moving faster around it? How to contend with that.


See too: Jana Euler at Galerie Neu & Portikus, Jana Euler at Kunsthalle Zürich, Jana Euler at Bonner Kunstverein

Michaela Eichwald at Maureen Paley

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The platter served on matters, canvas tends to absorb any spillage of material suggestiveness, but poured onto pleather paint flourishes in its implication: painters are smearing their own oily expelleds.  Like graffiti's intestinal signatures defecating their authorial, artworks that we conceptually digest while our stomachs do the same. Looking at art doesn't work if you have to take a piss, its magic is ruined by a heavy bag, so that when you try conceptualize art with your head you're still reminded of your bowel held waste, the brown rope tethering us to earth that Eichwald seems to consistently paint.



see too: John Miller at Barbara Weiss, Nicolas Deshayes at Modern Art

Nora Schultz at dépendance

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Jury-rigging's nautical roots in the provisional ropes and lashing raising a temporary mast and sails - before basically come to mean any unsightly but workable solution to a problem - has a particular relevance to Schultz, whose early misuse of materials to create impromptu painting machines involved lots of rigging raising awkward solutions to the made up problems of needing to produce a painting to achieve that sort of elegance captured by outsider architecture, redneck repairs, and the whole meme of "if it look stupid but it works, it ain't stupid" captured by the internet, thematizing the absurdity of the problem's demands as a whole to begin with and then with further inelegant metal solutions to sculpture as horrendous jagged objects, the term is often malpropoed with "jerry-built" but not to be confused with the definition of "built unsubstantially of bad materials; built to sell but not last."


See too: Nora Schultz at Reena Spaulings

Sergej Jensen at dépendance

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They're still stains, these stains are just better organized, but still interested in rustic materiality, marks on fabrics, deployed with a domestic interest in the vintage, a "warm material" that - as Sanchez is right in pointing out - online spread like a meme of display screen relief, recalibrating our color rods where, in a white world of plastic, it feels good to see wood; which seeing Jensen's painting in person the fetishistic attachment to raw material unpainted was hard not to see in purview of that time's cultural trend leading to that explosion of bars with reclaimed wood everything and newfound reinterest in brass and stone and a sort wish for a return to materiality and sensitivity so prevalent that we should have taken the opportunity to introduce the public to arte povera, and reviewers describing Jensen's paintings like their high-thread-count bed-sheets, this wish for "the natural" that Jensen acquired through accumulating accidents (nature), and so the "painter without paint"(!) couldn't use paint because that would make a new image - which we were all so tired of - whereas stains and bleach and dust were patinas that only referenced age, but now using paint since 2013, but they're still stains in that they are ghostings of history's painting and still totally vintage.

see too: Dylan Spaysky at Clifton Benevento, Giorgio Griffa at Bergen Kunsthall

Ed Atkins at dépendance

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Fitting to see him now in the white wasteland of art's daily now as a disenfranchised series of promotional images adrift, incommunicable. Recall when Dave had the long ethereal hair of a newborn, bald Dave. Now Dave is dying, an infant with melanoma. Will Dave die? The existential questions of Dave pertain strangely to us all not since we're becoming less different from a render, but because our digital selves are already more widely real, and then who is Dave, the elderly child, newborn Dave.

See too: Ed Atkins at Serpentine Gallery, Mark Leckey at Haus Der Kunst + Kunsthalle Basel, Rachel Rose at High Art,

Thomas Bayrle at dépendance

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Wading through repetition of criticism that bogs Bayrle produces the same repetition fatigue of the paintings, trying to extract endless allegory out a single metaphor. And while the prophecy of Bayrle's oft cited Jacquard loom parable didn't bear out and the world doesn't look like the 60's science fiction expecting mechanization to ensure repetitive homogeneity, instead an endless individuation, the paintings do contain some abhorrence befitting the current situation, "It’s what Bayrle calls the quality of quantity, or the process of making pure quantity into a quality."


see too: Allan McCollum at Petzel

Linder at dépendance

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Aside from Linder's more explicit deconstructions of advertorial gaze, its basic formal tool of blasting an object onto another, virtual imposition, like Orozco's cat tins on watermelons, a sort of conceptual slapstick in the mistreatment of subject, a surrealism so primitive its feels like powerful comedy.

Christian Flamm at dépendance

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What would a radical graphic design look like? a graphic design whose cultural unacceptability found refuge in a gallery system in service protecting the things that had no other place in culture, violent and terrorous things rather than the bearers of symbolically valuable objects laden with taste it has become. And everyone standing waiting, hoping for it to be the trojan horse sleeping, waiting for the unveil of its final form of real cultural worth and not an economic one, everyone wanting to believe it.