Sayre Gomez at François Ghebaly

(link)

Here the cage bars become less literal. Fencing dissipates into the photographic techniques, a picture's non-focus is a frosted glass wall. A fake palm cell tower, a strip-mall sign: the impediment to a sunset. Homeless encampments censored against full identification. Gomez, is Hollywood's landscape painter with a sigh, using the techniques of tinseltown's advertorial golden era, the quick seduction of airbrushed leg landscapes. But instead of vistas we get cellphone towers. Only the grisly crust gets Gomez's full HD defect.  The stupid vile blackness of an Enterprise car rental sign to match Reinhardt's own. Whether this throwing in your face shit is stupidly cruel or realistic is your personal preference. "But I painted the banality so accurately!" cries the painter of life. "A mimesis so exact it enacts the drear it represents!" Call it antidote to the naive who think Hollywood is the nice part of LA, medicine to those who have never actually stood at Hollywood and Vine, walked that one block south of the restaurants in downtown. Someday this will all be yours, someday this will all be gentrified. Gomez at whim is able to flick his vaseline seduction on or, more powerfully, shut it off. This makes him coy. A gamesman. The paintings giveth and the paintings taketh, Gomez with his fingers. Yes, think Ed Ruchsa, but now words obscuring the view are attached to sign-poles, very realistic, yes, literal, yes. Literalness in all its stupidity is given in all seriousness its hard dullness.


See too: Andrei Koschmieder at Jenny’s, Sayre Gomez at Ghebaly Gallery

“Plains Ledger Drawings” at STANDARD (OSLO)

(link)

The perspectival ambiguity of the homes/tents/forts aligning around the edge of the paper which acts as edge of its world, like a fisheye lens for god, turn the paper any orientation and this was still the center of the world. And look at that soldier's leg, the soldiers falling back akimbo, while the guy on the horse is central, static, strong, as if the rider doesn't move, as if the world moves around him. The tension between pictographs, information and depiction, stories to tell.

*Of course though painful that while these are traded under ironically white lighting, the US's native populations are still among its most vulnerable people.


See too: Purvis Young at James Fuentes

Maren Hassinger at Tiwani Contemporary

(link)

Accumulate as ward against scarcity; arrange as ward against death. Identifying with the cast-off and detritus, seeing society waste and want not. Art which can express that lesser form of aesthetic judgement, compassion.

Minimalism's infatuation for the industrial process, of say Judd et al, was, in part, premised on these industrial processes deletion of the body and its "expression" (if not a promise of subjectivity excised entirely) in looking "pure," like objectivity, removing the human. ... Of course this was the lie of any commodity: that the clean aluminum sheets comprising boxes or laptops weren't simply wiped of their indentured sweat. Minimalism hid the body in the closet.

The hoarder artist re-stake the essential hand-care, human, blood, to what is considered by at best by most simply material. Treat waste with compassion.


Read: Melvin Edwards at Daniel Buchholz, Lutz Bacher at Galerie Buchholz and Sarah Rapson at Essex Street, Ser Serpas at LUMA Westbau, Yuji Agematsu at Lulu, Dylan Spaysky at Good Weather, Dylan Spaysky at Clifton Benevento,

Hanne Darboven at Sprüth Magers

(link)

Proposal: A series of videos of artists and curators explaining Hanne Darboven to their dad.

Katinka Bock at Pivô

(link)

Installation art seems made for its own Rube Goldbergifition, attachments and strings, pulleys and hangings: the appliances for hanging become the art objects themselves. Why do we like Rube Goldberg machines and their absurdification of the device. Is it comedy? The world rendered caricature? There is an undercurrent of nihilism, of angst and cynicism toward technology, neutering mechanical complexity as childlike confabulation. An angst or nihilism that subtly pervades Bock's work. As the PR says, Bock "‘profanes’" the exhibition space, contorted into subtly absurd gestures. "Katinka Bock chose Avalanche as the title of an exhibition in a country where it never snows but which is on the verge of collapse, like so many others."  The exhibition, its context, Sao Paulo, the art, its function, is made into cartoon, a fantastical contraption, a comedy device replacing actuality, a fantasy which is easier to deal with.

Past: Sara Deraedt

"Vacuums look like Star Wars droids, a technology not sleek but fantasy mechanical. The term 'greeble' was invented for Star Wars' scene builders to describe the false detailing added to increase surfaces visual complexity, to thus exoticize if not heighten the inferred technology. Vacuums are a tube that sucks and yet their encasements evolve all sorts of sleek sexual-mechanical curves and corners. A shell that infers the inner without much referring to it. The casing isn't designed for the object inside but for person deciding upon it, obviously."

Click: Sara Deraedt at Essex Street

Sturtevant at Freedman Fitzpatrick

(link)

While the paintings/drawing provided question of what exactly was being looked at, (How did Hainley put it? What remains of a cancellation?) as occlusion of what was Sturtevant. Against this blindness, cancellation, or hole, after her tennis break she returned with a visual maximalism that was so incredibly alluring. Recall seeing the inverted video pyramid at Gavin Brown - throbbing soundtrack lead in - and, mesmerized, watching the entire length of the video several times. What other art film has done that? Creating a gluttony, a casual technical lucidity that made them so consumable, a sugar image. They invoke an amnesia, the feeling of watching television as children, hours passing. Wake up to find yourself having been entranced by a void.