Olga Balema, Geta Brătescu at Galerie Barbara Weiss

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Like Fred Sandback from hell. Not the transcendent floating, but ropes tying you to floor, your immanence: "To dwell, remain" on this bitch of an Earth. It's "important because it makes you look down, an expression of shame."

"It wasn’t that group of late Rembrandt self-portraits. It was their unrestored frames. Dull and dusty and cracked in the corners, they were the materialization of the age and poverty worn on the represented faces, of the humanity reflected in the represented eyes. The frames provided those poor, passive pictures with a haven from the inhuman grandeur of the museum’s imperial architecture, held them in their own history—not a history of masterpieces but the history of lived life. They enacted a kind of resistance that the paintings themselves couldn’t mount, being as they were so contained by that architecture and all it represented. The waitress in the café on the museum’s second floor, where I took refuge behind a massive marble column, sobbing, had obviously seen this before. She sat me down and administered Vienna’s other famous cure: a cup of hot chocolate and a piece of Sacher torte. She wouldn’t let me pay."

 Or: The yellow preventative against conceptualism. 

 

John Lindell at Corvi-Mora

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There are just certain curves that imply. That we will relate to. Not tell mom about. "The most direct rules of inanimate erotics are first- that the object be becoming flesh, and second exemplifying the curve of inside into out. These turns are important, they mirror our body's soft points, the vulnerable pink cusps. Your lips, eyes, anus, ears, urethral opening, these twilight moments rolling into... an expression of explicit vulnerability. They resemble, brandish resemblance, which morph in sinuous exterior/interior unsecured - aortic openings hint interior chambers, others skeletal - they twist in on themselves like an ouroboric muscle car. Like cutting open your abdomen to reveal a cathedral. ... but the transitional state of the objects isn't so much a becoming-subject of the abject, but instead a faint pubescence of gender, objects just arriving at a split, a fork budding a semblance of female or male possibility..."

Sophie Reinhold at Fitzpatrick Gallery

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"Aporia" industrializes the poetic - it is the rupture in understanding, the internal disjunction, a preventative against relieving meaning its burden. You read a sentence, understand it and move on. But the poetic aporia of a poem's line provides no conclusion. This is the life support of art, meaning eternally suspended from conclusive death. Ever further "meaning," ever longer wall texts. But as we've gotten better at corralling interpretations, butterfly pinning beauty to theory - the artist must gather from further ends in the fields of elusivity. Eventually the canyon becomes large enough and field once again becomes meaningless and we get to enjoy flowers again. Sink into the bubble's bath.

"...the only thing left to do is to produce greater and greater gulfs of meaning": Carissa Rodriguez at Wattis, Adriana Lara at Algus Greenspon, Henning Bohl at What Pipeline

Past: Maggie Lee

"coolness is an affect ...  the subject expresses through the grate of social coding, is its pathos. [...] self-expression immediately confronted with the terror of self-consciousness. 'Gigi is me in 2006.' A teenage self-conciousness..."

"The bedroom as terrarium, the girl as experiment."

Read Full: Maggie Lee at Real Fine Arts, Maggie Lee at 356 Mission

 Past: Shana Moulton

"humor in searching for spiritual value in commodic life ... juxtaposed with the day's small tragedy turning over a can of beans to read its ingredients"

"endless mockery of her subject's desire to appear ... bullying our desire for comfort in recognition .... somberly kicking us when we're down with a medical donut strapped to our ass"

"You've got to actively believe for the things to have effect: the point was the power was inside you all along... The placebo effect so strong in the US that drug manufactures have difficulty time creating new painkillers that are stronger than sugar pills. The effect is not seen in Europe, or pretty much any where that does not allow pharma advertising."

"That this mass inculcation might be the strongest effect of all, like we're all living in a theater in mass suspension because thats what gets the crystals like art to work."

Click full: Shana Moulton at Kunsthaus Glarus, Shana Moulton at Gregor Staiger

Past: Jutta Koether

"but whereas today’s puzzle painting exists as a kind of confounding delay of symbol's comprehension, Koether's over-saturation never a maze but a hyperlink version..."

"what you're looking at isn't what you're looking at: what you're looking at is cultural baggage, garbage piling your sentience. It floating to the surface like diapers, the noise of signal and symbols. You can't see purely, you are clogged with reference."

"Well these are as ugly as they come. There is almost weight to the ugliness, like it sags off the picture ... continuously giving painting an excess content, the hyperlink references, the hung on glass, adding layers until it's gluttonous, unwieldy, here: bloated.

Click here for full Jutta Koether at Bortolami, Jutta Koether at Museum Brandhorst, Jutta Koether at Galerie Buchholz

 Past: Martin Wong & Aaron Gilbert at P.P.O.W

"Which against this dull light, Gilbert's figures grow etiolated, leggy, soft. They bend in strange ways. Squishy vulnerability. For all the bad situations they still manage to find a lot of pleasant lighting, lovely pastel color."

Full: Martin Wong & Aaron Gilbert at P.P.O.W