Kerstin Brätsch at Gavin Brown



Since the patternal permutations are endless in indifference, little interest found in their production line marbles in interminable variation (though the PR does its job unpacking and assigning new roles to the symbolism.) Brätsch’s work never quite looking as good as their commodity packaging counterparts found on store shelves everywhere but still fine, its more about the curled paper tacked and temporary walls and mystic install.
Of course some collector is going to put them in a frame, but for now they look crappy and disheveled and good. Well it would be enjoyable to get in here in the A.C. and take a break.
But no one is ever going to believe in these surfaces, or get up close and just admire like the nebulousness of it all, man, the same spirituality found in patterned mandala of so many bolts of fabric, again inbetween production lines, like that Henning Bohl show at Casey Kaplan, or the sublime rot of Sigmar Polke. This is Gavin Brown afterall, the gallery who finds interest in the profound gap of meaning and enterprise in art.

Shio Kusaka at greengrassi



I mean of course these look good. Great even. To roll one in your hands. All the bright desire of commodity souvenirs - their cute lovable simplicity, the love of refuse, the handmade, the cutsey irrelevance in a line. The tiny sculpture trick. The Richard Scary one of each kind trick.
The Artworld always has exactly one ceramist, and one could find a conspiracy in this with the passing of that other major clay-man, her emerging as he was passing into history. It’s a like a tenured position: The Artworld’s ceramist. Not that Kusaka isn’t good, but rather where are the others, there must be some, can’t just be one potter.

Isabelle Cornaro at Museum Leuven



What a totally enjoyable video, a plethora of suspense laden vignettes the simplicity of which must leave Blockbuster directors gruff, all the slow anxiousness of classic horror films, in the psychotic tenor of claustrophobic 70’s psychadelia. The Blob all the more unbearable because of its inhuman candy color.
The rest of the work just can’t maintain the same tension in its formalness, all coming across as quite nice, fine actually, just pleasant objects to fill space, asking the banality of “what could they mean?”-style press release fodder, but maybe they're better in person, though Cornaro’s films always seem to do so much more than the objects, though what a tragedy of a place to install it.

Tom Burr at Franco Noero
Drunk Emily



Tom Burr owns the foppish gesture, regardless whether he birthed. Despite it’s cliche as “emblem of Contemporary Art,” Burr’s dramatized version is the best. The objects obtaining a cartoon caricature-esque quality, iPhone icons of contemporary art, somehow losing the sharp imperfection of real objects. The reckless arrangement attains a rigidness opposing the lesser artists' rigid attempts to feign recklessness. The starch pressed severity make the attenuation towards the diaristic details all the more fetishistically perverse and good.

“Inside Arrangement” at Mary Mary
John Finneran, Jonathan Gardner, John McAllister, Gerda Scheepers, Sam Windett



Much painting has come to resemble pop or electronic music, overfilled genres in which the stifling amount in oversaturated markets leaves little room new, the micro advancements recycled from the waste mines of the past, looking for that new sound that rockets to the top of charts, played in every club - a brief intense pleasure, briefly, before everyone else leeches onto that sound, and once again sounds bland, recycled, grey. Painters seem scrambling for that remix of styles that looks so candy cane pleasurable. A new form, a rethought style, the oblique approach to re-critique past participles, the re-appropriated language of art, pasts verbs become nouns rearranged on a surface.
This show got all the pop of paintings now. That meta-winking but direct surface. The post-critical critical. Shining colors. The just so slight flat, flat-footed picture plane. It looks great. Scheepers paintings definitely hitting the sound of tomorrow’s moment, a sort of meta-kassay poptronics. The Bonnardian Instagram of yesteryear in flat Mcallister. The loosed goose of Finnerman’s Munchian spirtually brushy. Sam Windett’s a little too earnest brushy futurism. And the awkward illustrations. These five have to be making the most desirable paintings today.

Giorgio Griffa at The Douglas Hyde Gallery



These gain import through Arte Povera, making their restraint sensible, attending to the physicality of painting, the importance in the folds, still crisp, in the heavy cotton. The way they hang hotly against a wall, but still one would hope for the crisp refreshing coolness of Kimber Smith who allowed a little more play in the restraint, making things a little weirder, and little dumber than what’s on here. They’re just so gentle, and nice. I mean they’re nice, but just so nice. In the impoverished context they’re almost sensible, make total sense.

Sebastian Black at Retrospective



Could you care less for this show. The model sculpture looks great, the pleasure of architectural models and white hot minimalism linked in arms. Okay its overripe fruit according to the press release, but its still overripe fruit in front of you. Gleaning self-import through the contextlessness of it all. How mysterious. and look at all these architectural renderings rolled and strewn. Mis-en-scene of the mad genius. It all seems so grand, so overblown.