Elza Sīle at Embajada

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Our detritus starts to congeal again a painting. Rachel Harrison blew up the mall, the cargo cult aftermath of 00's and 10's left the Lieskian ontologists with totemic yard sales grasping at rubble's meaning, and now in the ruin and filth.. new life? Protozoa animism? Shrines to the stuf accumulating in our veins. 

See too: Yuji Agematsu at Lulu

Past: Oscar Tuazon at Le Consortium & Paradise Garage

"See, generally these things are so boring and ubiquitous, we don't notice them. These everyday things. So Tuazon uses all the common ways of making things, but assembles them in different ways that our brains aren't bored with, that allows you to recognize or see what your brain would normally be too bored to see. So you notice even the boring stuff. See he has a feti-, er, intense affinity for the protestant, er, blue-collar, or like, see, he appreciates the common job, son. The vernacular, er, that's why nothing is that spectacular, that interesting. The muted tones. It's a moral ethic, son. Have you ever seen Bruce Nauman's "Setting a good corner?" Of course not you're five. Right"

... or like those dog-eared books with cross-sections, cut-intos, of like houses and steamships? See Tuazon's sculptures are like that. You get to see everything, you notice the structure, you glean a moral appreciation for hard work. For the structure, son. Yes, son, endlessly romantic..."


Oscar Tuazon at Le Consortium & Paradise Garage

Oliver Osborne at Tanya Leighton

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The Symbol. Archaic and X-rayed. Dressed and redressed. What could it mean, this puzzification. A clue is presented, then tortured, wrung for information, why won't painting tell us, why, speak dammit. 

Past: Oliver Osborne at Peles Empire (Matte Representation)

"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)  deploying what [the digital] cannot. Artisanal Old-timey rendering, wrapping its cold surface in warm wool."

Read full: Oliver Osborne at Peles Empire (Matte Representation)

Richard Tuttle at Modern Art

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You got to hand it to Tuttle, he never cashed in, never cast it in bronze. Instead still the pernickety things hard to swallow, like fishing lures they need only approximate the shiny fish of formalism. Provisional objects still hook us. Look how crappy that sculpture is. Is this cute? Coy? Useless? Still resolutely ugly in a formally confetti way, continually falling apart is what they were meant to. 

Cay Bahnmiller at Galerie Barbara Weiss

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Unintentionally, our preservation of artist's lives come to resemble Thek's meat boxes. Most moving: tragedy as the post-mortem of life cut up and pieced out into sterile containers, a dead butterflies, we marvel at creation only god could create. Now separate from. Who do we pay alms to here? Science cannot adequately describe the natural world as it is lived, there is a disjunction between life and its evidence, autopsy. 

Claudio Coltorti at Galerie Hussenot

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So close!