SIGNA at Simian & Angélique Aubrit, Ludovic Beillard at Centre d'Art Contemporain La Synagogue

(Simian, Cd'ACLS)

We had always predicted Wilkes to come back, but never expected its haunting to be literalized into performance. Nor in matching colors. Wilke's materialism no longer enough, we need stronger ghosts.  

see too: Cathy Wilkes 

Past: Joanne Greenbaum

"... gentility balanced with an undercutting maximalism, like a dog having found the birthday cake to lay it out once again on the patterned rug.

"the confusion of painterly terms, parsing the difference in Greenbaum's marks between accident and expression, calculated or automatism. The categories get blurry in regurgitating expressive modes, flaunting its social codes ... always teasing something that we might find repulsively not-painting, irrational.

"... the schizo positioning of painting today, in which everyone wants a subjectivity expressed but no one wants human expression. The hysteric is the ability for the human to appear through the grate of order; social, relational, capital, or artistic."


Joanne Greenbaum at Crone, Joanne Greenbaum at Richard Telles

Leda Bourgogne at QBBQ's

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Really got everything.

Gerrit Frohne-Brinkmann at Noah Klink, Berlin

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Little hosts, infected with virus, because their users wanted love. We find such odd proxies for ourselves, we are able to anthropomorphize at distance. Find identification with Wall-E robots rather than corpulent humans. The stupid magic of little underdog computer as effigies, set to slow burn.

Sarah Rapson at Modern Art

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As our arts fight against the endless behind-glassing of virtualization, the distressed look of materiality is in right now. But these seem less about flaunting swatches of a quickly etherealizing world than about an insistence on the material substrates of our thought. A reminder that these are the moldy objects we build our empire on. 2,000 years of grandiose diction projected on slowly eroding blankets. We proclaim "painting now and forever." In reality it will last as long as it's cared for. Not so much painting/materiality as the loss of. Be careful.

see too: Lutz Bacher at Galerie Buchholz and Sarah Rapson at Essex Street

Group Show at The Downer

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It's courageous, setting your art against the outside, to compete with the real. This is space of painting's "pure idiocy." Its hard headed survival. Or the PR more descriptively, "On the whole, [painting] is fully unbothered by its detractors and lumbers on, buttressed by history and money. Like Don Draper telling some irate underling that’s trying to shame him, “I don’t think about you at all.”" Painting is "this invincible thing that is constantly at war with itself is exhilarating." A stupid animal surviving in spite of itself, protected by some aura, which we all love to argue endlessly what. Art, as our collective cloud based MMORPG. As long as there's players, the game continues. 

David Korty at Derek Eller Gallery

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Laying somewhere in a lineage between Carrol Dunham, David Reed, Math Bass, painting becomes cipher, a code for it, turned into its puzzle pieces. PR: figures "haunting me from logos and bygone cartoons, advertisements meant to sell desires more than childhood entertainments." The wacky fun of painting converted to information, iconographies of, which connote but don't mean. We feel like we could make sense of these, connecting the dots between its puzzled parts. But we won't, they are their scrambled non-sequitur. What is important to note is that painting converted to symbols for it.