How has it come to pass we find Ned Vena enjoyable? We like it. What indoctrination has brought us here, this artificial and chemical form of quotational painting. Or is that the enjoyability of it? The Toxic Avenger version of abstraction. Clinically chemical. Finding “life” in the tiny space of the handmade glitch, itself a totally dead gesture - the accident that births the swamp thing: a “crosshair.” The permeating rubber vapor entrenched against that which would purify it. Everything derivative, prepackaged, a readymade conceptualism again again again in the arms-race of the most dead, bludgeoned, form of modernism. How can we kill it again, and again they ask, until it becomes its own genre, a mannerism of cold supposed irrationality that actually makes total sense: the press release draws out every referential hook from the work, and reads like a thriller, the detective chases clues left by a self-exposing criminal, who so desperately wants to be found naked, alive and diddling to be hoisted to the courts of fortune and fame.
Not to even talk about the exhibition’s title, “MENACE II SOCIÉTÉ.”