Oliver Osborne at Peles Empire (Matte Representation)

The new school of Matte Representation, scumbled opaque facades:  

Clockwise from top left: Oliver Osborne, Nolan Simon, Caleb Considine, Jennifer J. Lee

Paint like suede. Leather, rubbed, treated. The point is the [soft opaque] surface, a shallow pool both lets sight in and reflects us. A plane to project on. Have you touched a movie screen, they're like this. Silver, and we can theorize an internality, a subject inside, however privy we are not to it. A surface that warbles in little blots scumbled. What do you see, what do 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.

"This sense of content being astray has to do also with the process’ vying for significance."

Call the exhibition Clue. 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.

In our time textures are of utmost importance in creating realistic digital worlds. Objects are surface to be texture-mapped, painted, [artist]'s micro-attention to the variants of matte diffuse surface (something digital rendering has difficulty with) and scattered specular speaks to the digital by deploying what it cannot. Artisanal Old-timey rendering, wrapping its cold surface in warm wool.

Read more:

Caleb Considine at Massimo de Carlo, Oliver Osborne at Gió Marconi, Nolan Simon at What Pipeline, Caleb Considine at Daniel Buchholz,

“iwillmedievalfutureyou1” at Art Sonje Center

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"I will medieval future you" a curse with hints of the apocalypse - drawn to sci-fi catastrophe, an exhibition conjuring gore and Hollywood-esqu FX. "suspends our conception of linear time by fusing past and future" like any dystopian Thriller. Art as our sandbox and artists enjoying the rush of the crushing of its wet castles. The limits of art's playpen, the tiny emperors and artistic roleplay, begin to feel depressing when you place art in a chronology of society, placing art against societies' arbitrary advancements - did anyone predict a phone like a portal to god - art feels not only like make believe, but not even really the best make believe. You start to nostalgia primitive forms of art like cave painting, just painting, because, as this tech-sfx-scifi presents, we're just building backdrops for our global immolation.

NADA Miami 2019

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Art Basel Miami Beach 2019

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I mean holy bright and bubbly rainbows, humongous goopy aluminum, and just overall a phantasmagoria of oreo-like stuf, too much stuf, everything looking like a stop sign, like a battering ram. Maybe a yearlong moratorium on red, or rainbows, or are we armoring our emotions against a world ending 2020.


See too: CAD'S NADA BASEL MIAMI

Sandra Vaka at Kunsthall Stavanger

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The world isn't so much a vampire as a system of straws attempting to drink one another's milkshake.

Mark Roeder at Michael Benevento

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The coyote is still hungry despite his body made of cartoon latex. It's implied in his pre-emptive dinner attire, fork knife bib. The coyote never never catches prey, as per the rule, never eats, his hunger is Sisyphean, law. Whatever rupture was in service to plot must repair itself by show's end, return tomorrow. Like the the 90s sitcom, like television prior on-demand, the situation self-repairs. A finite period affected by a specified illness. He had an episode. An eternal aphasia, amnesia. Narrative like gum. The 90s sitcom was a cartoon was a T1000, shotgun blasts to chest tomorrow a pristine police uniform to wait for Godot. Who what or where Godot matter none, the MacGuffin, the gold briefcase, the promise of a tomorrow always still returning. Surely the bird will never die, us eternal hungry.

Monica Majoli at Galerie Buchholz

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"There was [pre-AIDs] such a high level of connoisseurship…of everything that people like this were interested in. Of everything. That made the culture better. A very discerning audience, an audience with a high level of connoisseurship, is as important to the culture as artists. It is exactly as important. Now, we don’t have any kind of connoisseur audience. When that audience died, and that audience died in five minutes. Literally, people didn’t die faster in a war. And it allowed, of course, the second, third, fourth tier to rise to the front. Because, of course, the first people who died of AIDS were the people, oh, I don’t know how to put this, got laid a lot. Okay, now imagine who didn’t get AIDS? Okay? That’s who was then lauded as the great artists, okay? If the other people who hadn’t died, if they were alive, if they all came back to life, and I would say to them, Guess who’s a big star? Guess! Guess who has a show on Broadway? Guess who’s like a famous photographer? They would fall on the floor. Are you kidding me? Because everyone else died. Last man standing."

I think this is Fran Lebowitz quoted in the PR (slightly confusing) but also I think this is Hainley quoting her to tell people to shut up? since those not raised on the magazine these are extracted from  - or saw the shift from these soft naturalist men to post-AID's armorized beefcakes - are at a loss for a language they are always translating. And, of course, a prayer for that audience's return.

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But so again here Majoli's internal softness against things with harder inclinations. Say, previously the "rubbermen" whose hardedge clouds of humans men suspended, their breath contained in rubber, hanging like mercurial thought bubbles, were almost able to be blown away like a smoke ring. And have you seen her abstractions? Again hard edges but formless nights. Outlines. People disappearing into chiaroscuro, night or light like scalpel. Everyone has an armor in Majoli's paintings, they are armored, depict soft things in armor. Like crabs whose hard shell contains sensitive forms.