In 2010, Gambaroff - just prior to his explosion as cool-art-darling - was making mugs printed with, what would become, his signature slack non-signature, the no-assed squiggle of someone who just can’t be made to care about whatever his authorship might connote, making mugs printed with this, and using these souvenir mugs as literal building-blocks. But the symbolism was oppressive, and Gambaroff, in a moment of what must have been white-hot ecstatic brilliance, stripped the metaphorical baggage and, compressing with coal-into-diamond tightness, conjured pictorially perfect gems, selling as fast as god’s chariots would allow, running into each new exhibition with the all permutations of his painting emissions, and swapping in with each installation gimmickry to keep it looking slightly fresh, as if to prove the immaculate concepts of his on-an-on-ism, a little pro-bono work to help the real coins get passed from behind the installation-as-commodity-camouflage, and evolving with the slow pace of modernist painter getting ready for what to do with his seminal vestiges next, and continued this way ‘till now, here again in front of your face again, 4 years later for the 7th or 8th time.
Currently instead of newspapers and advertorials we have comic book pages, the famous ones from Alan Moore, Frank Miller, Geof Darrow, reduced to sticky ruination wallpaper; and a new variant on the Oulipo-poetry-press-release hiding that even if there were something to say, it would have been the same non-thing for tenth time now, eye-rollingly, whatever; and then the addition of some game-boards to talk about instead, something about social relations, eye-rollingly, a metaphor so symbolically ham-fisted that you wish he had just made it really clear and printed them with what they were always made to say inspite of brushy ineptitude, the gameboards: Sorry.
