Berlinde de Bruyckere at Hauser & Wirth

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In the American version of horror film The Ring, a famous scene of a horse loose on a ferry jumping overboard to its (oncoming) death. The scene, which like most recent horror is a series of horror images strung together by a thin plot, is striking for the horse's strong leap into the water jarringly interrupted by misjudging the jump (underscoring the horse's fraught psyche) hitting the side of the boat to tumble end over end into dark water. The scene is reminiscent of Dick Hallorann's anti-climatic demise in The Shining, or the opening shooting at dogs in The Thing, rejecting our expectations of Hollywood cliches (the savior, the majestic horse, killing the innocent dogs) by abruptly severing them as an implicit statement that the rules are off and a new unruled territory (of terror(!)) has been entered. De Bruyckere's horror scenes trade in similar tensions, the powerful horse so magnificent and frail, everyone growing up with stories of horses being shot in fields unmercifully merciful after breaking legs, and after watching in The Ring the innocent horse plowed to bits by the ferry's prop into red water, it acts as a marker underlining that even the innocent can be made to pay, a symbolism not lost on de Bruyckere.

See too: Michaël Borremans at Dallas Museum of Art Berlinde De Bruyckere at S.M.A.K.

Caleb Considine at Massimo de Carlo

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In a time when texture gains an utmost importance in creating immersiveness in digital worlds, where objects comprised of surface to be texture-mapped, painted, Considine'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, a sort of prescient anachronism: artisanal Old-timey rendering, wrapping its cold surface in warm wool.

See too: Mathew Cerletty at Office Baroque, Daniel Dewar and Grégory Gicquel at Micheline Szwajcer

Sue Tompkins at Lisa Cooley

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When the then burgeoning band dissolved it left Tompkins vocal tracks unaccompanied, but Tompkins was still the hypnotically consumate performer, and to perform words you said them. And so the bouncy atempo monologues without the band to shape it made for a plinko coin prosody, floating words’ disjointed and inharmonic edges to hang about meaningfully awkward.  And how did you perform painting? By putting the stuff on the canvas.

Karen Kilimnik at 303 Gallery

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Droitcur: quirky innocence
Time Out: Unabashed Kitsch
Roberta Smith: woman-child imagination

Two Artforum articles of length act as antipodal oscillation asserting Kilimnick's content,
Hainley's citing Kilminik's siting as IED mirrors in the halls of the rich, ready to shatter jewel's broken glass into their visages caught reflected in the decadence, as a giant "fuck-you" to the rich, taking time to amass evidence of and against that who Hainley, in deference, refers, 18 years prior, Rhonda Lieberman's 1994 cover confoundment, in who's (Lieberman's) initial assumption of critique is continually railroaded by Kilimnick herself's brick wall amassed of unmitigated love for everything, including the blank facades of wealth and decor, and evidence of provided.


See too: Katherine Bernhardt at Venus Over Manhattan, Simon Denny at MoMA PS1

“duh? Art & Stupidity” at Focal Point

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Stupid feels like an imprecise word when the history of art since Manet could be seen as evidence toward a theory of stupidity in art. Wasn't that luncheon an example of acting stupidly in the face of the era's high ideals. Duchamp's Fountain was stupid. Pollock claimed to be as stupid as nature. Minimalism was defacto stupid. Nauman, stupid. Appropriation, stupidity's bedrock. And if we define stupidity as the lack of intelligence, and intelligence is seen as a codified measurement of what a society accredits as valuable, then artists are almost by defintion a displacement of that system.

Judith Hopf at kaufmann repetto

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Dumbness, stricken without the possibility of speech, becomes humorous in the expectation of its context art, where critical aversion to meaning/speech, that bricks arranged gravenly onto a floor are meaningful but assembled in figuratives and rejecting the interminable voice/production necessary in world that requires it, stonewalling yourself, becomes a laugh.

Vittorio Brodmann at Halle Für Kunst Lüneburg

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By turning the painting into an accumulation of "Brodmann moments", in a sort cave-painting/graffito mode, Brodmann compositionalizes his semio-capital, transmuting it into information, into a field of redirects failing to place it anywhere, turning it into painting as sort of recursive field, allowing to renege on the artist task of "be Brodmann" while being Brodmann.


see too: Julien Ceccaldi at Jenny’s Fredrik Vaerslev at Centre d’Art Contemporain Passerelle, Vittorio Brodmann at Freedman Fitzpatrick