Past: Elliott Jamal Robbins

The artist waits to pull the light-cord of an idea, the phallic gun of abstraction's seminal order, onto a conveyer belt of canvas, gets his identity in order, Tap, Click, POW, Splash, Whoosh, Whir, and Tssk, a production all too mechanic, paint a depressing fog, maybe a spray of brains. 

Full: Elliott Jamal Robbins at Kai Matsumiya, Elliott Jamal Robbins at Park View/Paul Soto

Aria Dean at Greene Naftali

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The disquiet is a lack, everything here is removal. The crash crash minimalism is instead a computer rendering - the handsy violence of Chamberlin reproduced in silicon gum, printed. Blank assets of a Looney Tunes world. What if we removed all this, life? A gray goo situation, the jouissant world replaced with... the basest simplest desire of self reproduction. The gray goo scenario is a metaphor for art, for everything, what if our propagation is what it's all about? Highest achievement, another art exhibition. The artist gets out the goo. 

Dean making work without any of the generalized signifiers of Black art, while avowing her "ongoing pursuit of art that models the structure of Blackness." Dean's is a work that is scrubbed. This scrubbing would be a fertile ground for critical hooha, but mostly it is an affective one, in the sense that it's almost affectless, chilly. Slaughterhouse modernism, art galleries, the anti-ligature rooms of our age. "A room full of paintings that won't let you kill yourself."

See too: Aria Dean at The Renaissance Society, Melvin Edwards at Daniel Buchholz

Past: Birke Gorm

Our rising desire for materiality in a world losing it manifests in fetish for increasingly grotesque versions... fecal smearing serve many real purposes that are often overlooked by caregivers and medical providers: ...

Materialize has become  a new process akin to electroplating, anodizing, or gilding. Artists "materialize" things like text into substance, into a material with weight, turd like figures, objects which feel material. ... materialization is the patina of objectification, an excess...

Birke Gorm at Croy Nielsen, Birke Gorm at Croy Nielsen(2)

Tomma Abts at Galerie Buchholz

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Stubborn becomes a horn filling the air, an ongoing announcement: "having or showing dogged determination not to change one's attitude or position on something." Stubborn. Repetition is part of the point, rubbing past painting into these "new" ones. The "abstract Morandi" - the permutations of a few simple vessels - flitting between abstraction and concrete shadows. Unsure whether these pull off the same miracle. 

Past: Tomma Abts

That despite Zwirner’s PR qualifying Abts as “continuously explor[ing] the activity of painting" (and not simply “painting” like a Neanderthal) Abts is a painter, and, since we’ve long forgotten how to speak about “dumb” painting, everyone instead argues why these aren’t, and instead speak of an “emotional rationality” and “anything but expressionist,” spreading pesticides against the fear of the subject reappearing like selves in the mirror.

The pleasure of Abts’s paintings is that of origami, or well constructed puzzle, like setting a good corner in New Mexico pasture, solving simply its own internal puzzling, like shaker furniture, a clever construction in a protestant like satisfaction of a few-frills job completed.

a triumph of deafness, buckling-down to the same task endlessly, slowly, stubbornly insisting on the cobwebbed autonomy of painting long ago cut and bled out.

Read full: Tomma Abts at David Zwirner, Tomma Abts at greengrassi, Tomma Abts at The Art Institute of Chicago

Benjamin Echeverria at Francis Irv

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Patina authenticates, proves labor, human, the subject goo we desire from painting. Painting is an adhesive that collects the air of its subject the artist. More than brushwork. It's how Guyton manufactured his celebration: all the little blips and drips and skips he was commended for tugging out - pressing print on the markers of work, authenticity! This was during the vogue of reclaimed wood cladding a world turning plastic.  The myth of artistic journey, as a symbol for it. "If I give you my denim. Will you simulate distress"?

See too: Alvin Baltrop at Hannah Hoffman, Frank Walter at David Zwirner, Purvis Young at James Fuentes

Past: Benjamin Echeverria at Parapet Real Humans

"You apply a video filter, you belabor the painting. Both become search for means to make 'residue' appear, of time, of warmth we're after. A weathering effect you can turn on and off like rain."

Full: Benjamin Echeverria at Parapet Real Humans