Past: Caleb Considine

"Have you touched a movie screen, they're like this. Bumpy, silver, with an internality we project, a subject inside, however privy we are not to it. What do you see is what you project. It's a new type of formalism where content is created then made an aside, rejected, cancelled by the imbroglio of meaning. A representation that is tampered, we stare at."

"The puzzles of today's painting in which their individuated flat symbols present a real mystery of a subject. Looking like de Chirico designed a board game. Soviet Realism for the icon age, new devotional painting. Colonel Rublev in the museum with a candlestick."

"... artisanal Old-timey rendering, wrapping its cold surface in warm wool."

Read full: Matte Representation, Caleb Considine at Daniel Buchholz, Caleb Considine at Massimo de Carlo

Christine Sun Kim at François Ghebaly

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CSK's work had felt less inclined to a gallery than to textbooks, drawings to be handed out at school instead of warehoused in art's jewelry box. They lacked the frivolity of most art by virtue of seeming necessary. They made their subjectivity an object - almost perfect for transmission, memes. Now they slowly lean heavier toward their more elusive and open-to-interpretation means. That plain speaking remains, and all manners of potential misinterpretation surely the point. But there was something so lighting rod about something no one misunderstood, the perfect language for it.

Cécile B. Evans at La Salle de Bains

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The storyboard/ideaboard has something so thoroughly [apt] to today. Unlike painting which finds its self-mysterizing its value (value in the interminably opaque, distantnced, surreal) the storyboard wears interpretation on its sleeve - it does not attempt to distance/detourn the information it contains - the storyboard collects referents, collects its valency. It's virtual, impressionable, loose. Choose your own adventure, hyperlink. It's more like the internet than a lot of the internet. 

Daniel Knorr at Galerie nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder

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Specimens of the world, color, art. "...resemble the little pieces of the Berlin Wall often sold as souvenirs." Torn from the it, placed on walls. Vivisecting our still respiring world - slicing it apart to begin the coroner's report. Art as a form of playing doctor, pretend this is real make believe, the fantasy of anything but a big dead beautiful rock.

“Breathing Through Skin” at Antenna Space

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Group shows always look like you blew up a mall because so much art treats culture as a system of artifacts to be interrogated by its own white light certification process, a factory for meaning production. Temples of.

See too: “A Love Letter to a Nightmare” at Petzel

Raphael Hefti at Kunsthalle Basel

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There are risks. In the process of his still young career, the artist has subjected himself to extreme heights and endured punishing heat, he once accidentally blew up his car (and as a result was under investigation for years by an anti-terrorism unit), and his hair temporarily fell out due to the substances he was using to produce his early photograms. For a solo show in 2013, he piled more than 25 tons of sand in his then-gallerist’s tiny London space and set in motion a chain reaction that sent an unstoppable flow of 1,600° Celsius molten steel down sand channels in an act that was partly sculptural and partly performative. No one was hurt and the gallery floors held up, but that these processes remained benign could not have been predicted with certainty. To make his art, and importantly also, to show his art, Hefti probes the limits of the possible, for himself as much as for the institutions who exhibit his projects. (This one being no exception: The weight of some of his works challenges the structural limitations of the historic Kunsthalle Basel building, the electricity coursing through other pieces court a high voltage risk.) 

This would make a great character in a book. Post-minimalism, but bigger. Turned to 11. Those Serras that killed people, awesome. Dealers out of business. The sum of all lines snorted. Oh yeah that's the stuff. 

SoiL Thornton at Essex Street

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Thornton seemed to have the insight that there are more interesting things than "painting," and that these things are (or can be assimilated with) painting, that painting is not the historical given. There is no "natural" painting but merely an inherited set of tropes that no one said you even have to play by. Rules to a game you didn't even realize existed. Kin say Richard Aldrich where almonds or pennies might be an equal painting axiom as Greenbergian "flatness".  Inflate a mattress, call it painting, it's not revolutionary except for the fact that no one else is on the same gameboard. 

A "befuddlement of the terms and conditions of paintings... obtuse, tangential starts digressing from those painting histories generally acceptable as beginnings. If the paintings seem facetious or frivolous it is because [x] doesn't necessarily [deem sacrosanct] the histories that are painting cannon..." Need not reinscribe them to reflect in them.

See too: Richard Aldrich at Gladstone Gallery, Darren Bader at Andrew Kreps