Jean-Luc Moulène at Chantal Crousel

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Moulène riding fine line of decorative tripe and experiments unnerving enough to shrug easy swallow - a straddling that tensions each. Moulène always threatening to fall into the high powered kitsch of Urs Fischer or Ugo Rondinone but never actually doing it. The automotive sex of the purple shiny thing is made explicit by the inflated concrete tits, its latent sex unhidden.

Nancy Lupo at Sydney

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Stuf becomes subject. Curdles a skin, a flake to slough. Contaminates, spreads. "Disposable." "Flushable." Problems in city pipes, amassing with congealed human grease to create clogs from hell. "Behold The Fatberg: London's 130-Ton, 'Rock-Solid' Sewer Blockage" A world unable to contain our disposability. Reamasses elsewhere, waiting in the night, leaking nightmare. Find toothpicks in veins. Lupo's associative juicing. The process of paper making and the accumulation of sewer blockage aren't that different. A more human pulp. A calendar of waste.

See too: Nancy Lupo at Kristina Kite, Nancy Lupo at Swiss Institute, Nancy Lupo at 1857, Nancy Lupo at Antenna Space

Fredrik Værslev at Gio Marconi

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"The electrified corpse of symbolism." Made to jitter again. Not just flags, stained flags the audience gasps, amazed at the corpse twitching. The symbols already existed, the idea already existed in Johns, but these paintings pull the corpse out for display again. A dead thing. Stare into the abyss, the abyss give back to the theater of your skull: this is called Prisoner's Cinema, a lack of stimulation causes the perception of phantasms. We write 10,00 word essays expounding the ghosts. They're symbols. They point. That's what they do. You perceive a content, like a corpse. But that's not grandma laying there.

See too: Fredrik Værslev at Bergen Kunsthall, Fredrik Vaerslev at Centre d’Art Contemporain Passerelle

Past: Fredrik Værslev

"... smoothed and well worn into comfort: the softness of acid-washed history, whose untreated denim is stiff, abrasive, and has edges that Værslev happily washes away, with the already pre-distressed historical material."

"There is no trap set, no one is going to “read into” these, only conceptual fracture of others moves loaded onto a canvas to re-package it as virtual corporate franchising... everything stolen and printed. A race to the bottom in derivative deflection en abyme. Not so much preferring not to, mass producing it."


Read full: Fredrik Værslev at Bergen Kunsthall, Fredrik Vaerslev at Centre d’Art Contemporain Passerelle

Tau Lewis at Cooper Cole

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Irrupt your desire into space. "meant to resemble a light-filled womb. ... sculptural textiles reflect on non-gendered motherhood and gardens as sources of knowledge and growth. ...tells a story of joy, freedom, and triumphant love." Scraps rearranged to manifest new reality. That we are imagining. We used to think the gallery provided critique, but we'll take fantasy, a different world.

See too: Jacolby Satterwhite at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, Marguerite Humeau at Clearing, Dozie Kanu at Project Native Informant, 

Marte Eknæs at A MAIOR

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Safety products not only abating hazard but highlight its possibility. A potentialized air of drama that we'd love to accumulate on art's stage: at any moment calamity, at any moment circumstance. There is said to be "a situation." Sort of like an "experience." Even this weak force in the real Painting wishes it could hold such potential. Some previously invisible thing be felt.  The "layers of infrastructure that determine experience."

see too: Marte Eknæs, Sean Raspet at Room East

 Past: Marte Eknæs, Sean Raspet at Room East

"Safety products not only abating hazard but highlight its possibility. A potentialized air of drama that we'd love to accumulate on art's stage: at any moment calamity, at any moment circumstance. There is said to be "a situation." Sort of like an "experience." Even this weak force in the real Painting wishes it could hold such potential. Some previously invisible thing be felt.  The "layers of infrastructure that determine experience."

"And Fight Club turned the 'Calculation of Negligence' into nihilistic mantra for millions of angst ridden boys, finding solace for their jade in a new schizo-sado-masculinity, solace in a brutality ending in terrorist fantasies of high-rises burning. It felt like relief. The main character's lavish condo exploding from a gas leak was ostensibly the best thing that ever happened to him. The non-accident we later learn is a symptom stemming from the very repressive bourgeois lifestyle it destroys. That the terrorist act was itself an expression of late-capitalist detachment, the same thing that Baudrillard would later claim in his "The Spirit of Terrorism" that capitalism expressed a sort of auto-terrorism, boredom itself bringing the towers down. The Pop success of both at least clarifies the latent cultural desire we have for the fantasy of watching the world burn so long as they are sublimated (make us able to believe we would never actually desire to see them enacted) through the filters of acceptable and neutering forms, pop-film or philosophy, and here art."

Read full: Marte Eknæs, Sean Raspet at Room East