Group Show at Tanya Leighton with Sadie Coles

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...exhibition most interesting for its documentation which turns to documentary. The work no longer accruing laurels through rent-space but argued in cultural speech. This is a subtle but powerful shift. Looking for new ways to internet its object. The press release becomes narrative voiceover. History becomes filmic juxtaposition. We've always had the accrediting power of Art21, or whatever mini-documentary, but now its put out in an exhibition, in place of it. That open headspace of clicking through images we can't let go uncapitalized, that's free real estate. Let the voiceover soothe. This might become a thing. At the time I had thought Leckey's Proposal for an Exhibition was the way forward, maybe this is what will come - Advertisement/documentary.

Bradley Ertaskiran [Bunker] at Contemporary Art Daily

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It's generally frowned upon, the extolling/photography of your own bellybutton. Navel-gazing's "self-indulgent or excessive contemplation of oneself or a single issue, at the expense of a wider view."

But when has art ever been above its own self-aggrandizement, mirrored-auto-pleasure. (We've practically turned that itself into an art.) (This the obvious fallout of institutional critique.) The mirror becomes shinier, more pixels added, until someday hopefully the functions themselves become visible. We ascribe great power to a room that is the ostensible factory of our meaning. Painful to find to only rooms. Go into a church and find the basement's folding tables, plastic conference rooms for the glory of God. They are but rooms. The phantasm of nothingness. 

Ala Bourdieu, the real consecration is getting people to believe. 

See too: REDCAT at Contemporary Art Daily

 Past: [Adam Feldmeth] at Contemporary Art Daily

"...Like fish bumping into glass, attempt to seek the limits of our experience, our aquarium of fantasy..."

Read full: REDCAT at Contemporary Art Daily

Hend Samir at Real Pain & Sophie von Hellermann at Larsen Warner

(Real Pain, Larsen Warner)

..trends for a sort of hyper-liquidity - hyperbole of the painterly... exaggerated to jest. ...the painterly involves a framework, a subject that bleeds. The painterly requires an object for the brush to caress. 

"Because it seems what we are actually pushing around on the canvas is the cultural object of painting. The canvas, support, oils, were long ago replaced by this mythos, its signifiers, significance."

("Paint becomes simply the candied shell to painting's cultural myth. ..Drawing ripples in surface to activate the beneath, tap the vast depths of painting's cultural wealth, this the watermelon.")

We want the painterly because this is painting's bright jewel - the more painterly it is the more undeniably painting it is, tautologically as symbol. In times of crisis we seek comfort in the familiar - put our money in what's safe. Is this why impressionism is coming back? When painting tends towards its hyperbolization - the ability to be more painterly, more Painting. We see time move in reverse, is this already impressionism?

See too: "Back to the Future impressionism" Genieve Figgis at Almine Rech, Ambera Wellmann at Lulu, Nicola Tyson at Friedrich Petzel, Nicola Tyson at Nathalie Obadia, "Watermelon Theory" Tala Madani

Past: Sophie von Hellermann

"Such softness, it's abject. Saccharine. Like walking around with cotton candy between toes, sugary resolve to true grit. Till your teeth fall out your head. But softness something of a ruse, a narrative lacking definition..."

"We look through the paint at some cloudy apparitions like a Renoir got wet. For all their candy von Hellerman's aren't all that appetizing; Suzanne Hudson called their characters etiolated, plants grown leggy in darkness, a feeling of being deprived of crucial nutrients..."


Read full: Sophie von Hellermann at Office Baroque Sophie von Hellermann at Greene Naftali

Olaf Breuning at Metro Pictures

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The big dumb. A more cartoon sculpture. Ironic paleo-totemism. With a smile. Breuning's interest in our connection to laughable things. The cruder it is, the more archaic it looks, the more permanent we perceive it. Interminably stupid rocks last an unfortunate forever. So paintings like pictograms, petroglyphs. Give a rock some doe eyes.

"As the world feels closer and closer to destabilization, isolationism, far-right tolerance, moves closer towards its end, we find solace looking towards the primitive technologies we might find as our future, and the deities we will worship in the trees we once had."

"we find some comfort in dirt smeared not because of its primeval "truth" but because it seems like it can't obsolesce, it can't be superseded, blown away as dust, which we mistake for being eternal."

See too: Olaf Breuning at Metro Pictures, Solange Pessoa at Mendes Wood DM, Aaron Angell at Koppe Astner

Past: Olaf Breuning

Clownic terror is emotional indifference to our own, irony as slapstick, forcing a replacement of our feelings with manic versions, to feel better. Happy or sad, the clown face draws its emotion as large as possible, overpowering the nuanced plane of facial expression, overshadowing our own, powerless and impotent. ... Breuning a villain swaddled in fun that is no fun at all.

Read full: Olaf Breuning at Metro Pictures(1)