Shabahang Tayyari at Balice Hertling

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These are nice (Iranian patterning meets cybernetic Guy Fieri Art Deco?) though wishes for the embedded content to be less burned images and more left to surface, but surely that just another means in a long tradition in finding representation for forbidden figuration?

See too: Sarah Morris at Berggruen

Past: R.H. Quaytman

"...The internet at the time felt like so many keyholes to look through. Everything before was found in dusty libraries, had been stuffed into artist catalogs, piecemeal, the one Quaytman "chapter" you saw in person at Abreu.. And Quaytman's paintings magnified the pleasures of this, of a good mystery. The doors of new media opening along with the mystery of Quaytman; it provided its own meta-detective story. ... and better digital resolution with each one. Go look at 2008's documentation here. Compare it to today's. We see it all now, pornography is the mainstay, all at once as much as you want. There is little left to the imagination, to mystery. ... in higher and higher resolution, eventually returned itself as an endless and inconclusive hall of mirrors. They revealed themselves as paintings."

"Quaytman is forebear to today's painting puzzification. Like any good mystery, it's rife with clues. Painting becomes signs and signals, turn painting into information ...'every detail... is subject to careful control.' Careful control presuming purpose for such ... The careful control of avoiding anything so specific as to be finally graspable, a very very finely tuned house of mirrors. ... Enough mirrors and the ventriloquist need not speak at all?"

See all R.H. Quaytman

Group Show at Queer Thoughts, New York

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A group show that's color coordinated. You could almost wear it as an outfit. Color graded to a Matrix like blue-green, an Amelie use of Red. So young but so cold blues. Vampires are immortal eternal teenagers, that's why they're prone to angst. 

Masahiko Kuwahara at Tomio Koyama Gallery

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Cuteness is a gargoyle, the policing gremlins of Gothic architecture dispersed into media, into Pikachu, politically kneading your desire into acceptable dough. Cuteness creates artificial identification, forces sysmpathy, care, for an object its church. You become sympathetic to their cause, the militarized demons of the holy police state, Pikachu. 

see too: Sam McKinniss at JTT, Misaki Kawai at The Hole, Sean Landers at Rodolphe Janssen

Past: Tony Cokes at Greene Naftali

 "...but now text is aerosolized, language appears from all corners buzzing up from your hand to see newscasts across the continuum. An economy of speech value is recalculated on the ability to harvest attention. ...  Cokes' read like poems of how text feels today, a glitchy attention deficit ... difficult to read but they command attention."

Full: Tony Cokes at Greene Naftali

Camille Blatrix at Centre d'Art Contemporain La Synagogue Delme

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An artist working in the simulacra, in the sign systems, in the question of a yoga pants basic versus the tactical version. Why do adult toys begin to look like elegant spacecraft. Why do vacuums look like mechanistic Star Wars droids? This is not functional form, but form conjuring affect, comfort, sales. 100HP dildos designed to sell. Getting off is tertiary to its main acts of looking sexually swallowable. The restaurant's table itself tells you how long to sit. They tell us what we are. This is all well documented. The point now is it's fun art theater.

Past: Camille Blatrix

"But tradition was wiped out by the invention of capitalist plastic. Labor was reduced to work, and craft became manufacturing processes, became laser cut wood, CNC milled blocks, a thousand interns on call. Suddenly your dreams could be injection molded. Ostensibly. "

"The cuteness of Hospital beds, which are ostensibly sympathetic to us. ... the look of object who wish to project their sympathetic nature to us humans."

Full: Sanya Kantarovsky & Camille Blatrix at Modern Art, Camille Blatrix at Wattis