Monika Baer Am Rhein Kunsthalle Bern

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The small shock of a joke, just enough, a surprise to the viewer befuddled. A balancing act: not too much be rejected as random, but just enough to be comedy. Painting was long ago converted to interface, an conscious interaction between painter viewer. Painter has the mic. The surprise is fun, funny, played for laughs in the deadpan space of art. 

See too: Monika Baer at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein

Past: Monika Baer

"Baer playing her own game of painting, our fun is figuring out the rules. There are many ways to play [...] Pleasures are denied and reinstated, the picture plane is mocked with cartoonified sweat but open to atmosphere, the viewer is asked to look in only to be pressed out by a little turd. I'm not sure how you win."


Read full: Monika Baer at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein

Julio Le Parc at Maison Hermes Le Forum

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This same artwork appeared on CAD exactly 10 years ago. The above is today, the below yesterday. There is probably nothing to be made from this info, from the difference, but you could. 

Ed Atkins at Sant'Andrea de Scaphis

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"...We continued to live through a distancing world held increasingly close, more finely detailed, not so much nuanced as mictorized: microscopically huge, a memory that was infinite, thoughts reappeared haunting you from underground server vaults, friends since ghosted returned with body supplements. Viral punishment: forever indoors. Forever asked to participate in the rooms where you could be viewed, thumbed, generally commented on. Like suddenly everyone is an artist inviting anonymous critics. A person we liked less you than her. Every teenager learned numbers/statistics by an emotional battery. The bodies got online, got ever more perfect and you got ever more, well, [blistery]."

CAWD wrote the exhibition texts, you can find them here, hosted by CAD.

see too: Ed Atkins

Tom Allen at Chris Sharp Gallery

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Don't tell me that brick wall isn't about to embroider a sphincter, navel, fistula between. Perfumed sexual flora otherwise soured on anus. Don't let them fool you, that's a butthole. A Google deep dream of. Pants opening reveal. Don't let them tell you otherwise, don't let them be coy, saying the asshole-like-an-opinion is in you, everyone's got one, this one is yours, abating ruined meaning, its not true, that is a butthole, next to a flora, next to an entrance, in an opening, a cleft of meaning, and I'm telling you yours is this.

Past: Tom Allen

"Flowers ...the Vegas sign advertising sex and nectar to bees, birds. What did Zizek say about tulips, 'an open invitation to "Come and screw me."'... this crass evolutionary productivity ... 'the lowest of the genres' gaming the system with hardwired desire. ...what artist has ever been above cheating? Flowers are an experimental-constant through which an artist may perform tortures on a cultural concept of beauty...

"...more Berghain than cottagecore - to paraphrase the press release. The pleasure here seems in twisting the dial to the humming point between saccharine pleasure and spoiled overripeness - between day and night - a painting your mother 'likes' with uncertainty... pleasure in this sweet spot hum."

"Tastes change however, but let these be a marker of 2020s - that this was the edge, the waver between sickness and wealth. Painting as stakes planted, this was the limit. So if you start to love these, see how far we've moved."

Tom Allen at Lulu, Tom Allen at Air de Paris

Israel Aten at What Pipeline

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Our childhood figures of action, action figures, painters, seminal spray webs from wrist, paint from sabres - blur together literally, figuratively. Arms dripping musculature of paint. Linework delineate form and forearm, masturbating, spraying Herculean abdomens, Doryphorian sixpacks, statues now with battle damage! a Kouros spiderman, carved lionman, power figures nailed wood, gods of the old style, men in the new style, a sistine God who benched heavy touched man. History's palimpsest of juggernauts Zeus to Antman, a framework to hang paint, "masculinity."