Berlinde de Bruyckere at Hauser & Wirth

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In the American version of horror film The Ring, a famous scene of a horse loose on a ferry jumping overboard to its (oncoming) death. The scene, which like most recent horror is a series of horror images strung together by a thin plot, is striking for the horse's strong leap into the water jarringly interrupted by misjudging the jump (underscoring the horse's fraught psyche) hitting the side of the boat to tumble end over end into dark water. The scene is reminiscent of Dick Hallorann's anti-climatic demise in The Shining, or the opening shooting at dogs in The Thing, rejecting our expectations of Hollywood cliches (the savior, the majestic horse, killing the innocent dogs) by abruptly severing them as an implicit statement that the rules are off and a new unruled territory (of terror(!)) has been entered. De Bruyckere's horror scenes trade in similar tensions, the powerful horse so magnificent and frail, everyone growing up with stories of horses being shot in fields unmercifully merciful after breaking legs, and after watching in The Ring the innocent horse plowed to bits by the ferry's prop into red water, it acts as a marker underlining that even the innocent can be made to pay, a symbolism not lost on de Bruyckere.

See too: Michaël Borremans at Dallas Museum of Art Berlinde De Bruyckere at S.M.A.K.

Caleb Considine at Massimo de Carlo

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In a time when texture gains an utmost importance in creating immersiveness in digital worlds, where objects comprised of surface to be texture-mapped, painted, Considine's micro-attention to the variants of matte diffuse surface (something digital rendering has difficulty with) and scattered specular speaks to the digital by deploying what it cannot, a sort of prescient anachronism: artisanal Old-timey rendering, wrapping its cold surface in warm wool.

See too: Mathew Cerletty at Office Baroque, Daniel Dewar and Grégory Gicquel at Micheline Szwajcer

Sue Tompkins at Lisa Cooley

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When the then burgeoning band dissolved it left Tompkins vocal tracks unaccompanied, but Tompkins was still the hypnotically consumate performer, and to perform words you said them. And so the bouncy atempo monologues without the band to shape it made for a plinko coin prosody, floating words’ disjointed and inharmonic edges to hang about meaningfully awkward.  And how did you perform painting? By putting the stuff on the canvas.

Karen Kilimnik at 303 Gallery

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Droitcur: quirky innocence
Time Out: Unabashed Kitsch
Roberta Smith: woman-child imagination

Two Artforum articles of length act as antipodal oscillation asserting Kilimnick's content,
Hainley's citing Kilminik's siting as IED mirrors in the halls of the rich, ready to shatter jewel's broken glass into their visages caught reflected in the decadence, as a giant "fuck-you" to the rich, taking time to amass evidence of and against that who Hainley, in deference, refers, 18 years prior, Rhonda Lieberman's 1994 cover confoundment, in who's (Lieberman's) initial assumption of critique is continually railroaded by Kilimnick herself's brick wall amassed of unmitigated love for everything, including the blank facades of wealth and decor, and evidence of provided.


See too: Katherine Bernhardt at Venus Over Manhattan, Simon Denny at MoMA PS1

“duh? Art & Stupidity” at Focal Point

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Stupid feels like an imprecise word when the history of art since Manet could be seen as evidence toward a theory of stupidity in art. Wasn't that luncheon an example of acting stupidly in the face of the era's high ideals. Duchamp's Fountain was stupid. Pollock claimed to be as stupid as nature. Minimalism was defacto stupid. Nauman, stupid. Appropriation, stupidity's bedrock. And if we define stupidity as the lack of intelligence, and intelligence is seen as a codified measurement of what a society accredits as valuable, then artists are almost by defintion a displacement of that system.

Judith Hopf at kaufmann repetto

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Dumbness, stricken without the possibility of speech, becomes humorous in the expectation of its context art, where critical aversion to meaning/speech, that bricks arranged gravenly onto a floor are meaningful but assembled in figuratives and rejecting the interminable voice/production necessary in world that requires it, stonewalling yourself, becomes a laugh.

Vittorio Brodmann at Halle Für Kunst Lüneburg

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By turning the painting into an accumulation of "Brodmann moments", in a sort cave-painting/graffito mode, Brodmann compositionalizes his semio-capital, transmuting it into information, into a field of redirects failing to place it anywhere, turning it into painting as sort of recursive field, allowing to renege on the artist task of "be Brodmann" while being Brodmann.


see too: Julien Ceccaldi at Jenny’s Fredrik Vaerslev at Centre d’Art Contemporain Passerelle, Vittorio Brodmann at Freedman Fitzpatrick

Nicholas Buffon at Callicoon Fine Arts

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The synecdoche of Buffon's New York rendered for figures of action, hypothesizing the manipulation of reality by the god-hands that can create it, Buffon instead lists the minor changes he makes to the banal reality surrounding him, which comes off as tragic. A world that you can create and instead replicating the world around you, the indifference within it, its own heroism.

see too: Pentti Monkkonen at High Art, Danny McDonald at House of Gaga, Nicholas Buffon at Freddy

Josh Smith at Bonner Kunstverein

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Adopts the cripplingly tasteful resignation of palatable colors in oyster-like forms and the champagne popped for the final internment of distinction between critical and sellout, subversiveness actually always tasteful or tastefulness now subversive.

See too: Josh Smith at at Eva Presenhuber

Nairy Baghramian at Museo Tamayo

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Double entendre of objects looking like innuendo, like bodily stones complicating the minimalist mantra that what you see is what you see, because what you see is sometimes sexually confusing, leather seats in car beginning to look like the lap of a heavily tanned, taught, and naked man. The cigar that just not might be, or rocks that just might, a “bodily” different from its post-minimalist reassertion; entendre produces a psychoactive uncertainty in polite company, and Baghramian has spoken at length of the object-turned-subject monster for which the art-world prescribes all talking cures those object orientated fetishists, like yellow socks with sandals, perverse.

See too: "Being Thing” at Centre International d’Arte et du Paysage & Treignac Projet, Katja Novitskova at Kunsthalle Lissabon, Nancy Lupo at 1857,  Torbjørn Rødland at Kunsthall Stavanger, Martín Soto Climent at Proyectos Monclova

“Photo Waste” at Cabinet

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The alienation continually recurring is well produced here in a simple series of categorical illustrations listed as exhibitionary requiem; events silenced; a world where Discovery of the means of production is profound entertainment; and drawing from back to a time when when looking was still a profound pleasure before its subsumption into a new semio-self-production conjuring a whole new coin: “selfie” alighting ourselves in immolating spectacle glowing blue, remembering things so way past, today no one goes to bed early against the illumation of de Brabant's new castle glass standing in for a world we believing ourselves connecting.

Allison Katz at Gio Marconi

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Painting a growing diaspora of signifiers accumulates a puzzle, symbol/icons that hyperlink a representation adverse to coalescing immediate overarching identity. The images’ unambiguousness made tense by that directness failing to deliver on its promise of arriving a destination. If seeing was once forgetting the name of the thing one sees, then the icon represents a gaping blindness.

See too:  Annette Kelm at Gio Marconi

Julian Göthe at Daniel Buchholz

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The sort of Figurative Surrealism that found satisfaction in the invention of new worlds sort of just fell off into its own genre fantasy which, like Winsor McCay, the pleasure of conjuring worlds was its meaning that one sadly must continually wake from. And ballyhooed fantasy that was conceded, relegated to the de-emancipated, and the slumbering masses. But as Göthe relays, "It is way better for you to have coerced, gently, a free man, than to have freed a thousand slaves."

Rodrigo Hernández at Kurimanzutto

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Icons distribute meaning; and, they, like art infer an order that is meaning, a rationality to be understood complying to the code that governs, and so when we meet an icon that we cannot infer definition for, it appears ominous, alien.


see too: Julien Ceccaldi at Jenny’s, Richard Rezac at Isabella Bortolozzi

Julien Ceccaldi at Jenny’s

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Altarpieces similarity to modern info representation and GUI space makes them somehow anachronistically the most relevant from of painting, pre-renaissance painting systems matching those of the mass systems we interface with daily in which above-all information must be conveyed, supplanting figuration with codes: image as icons broken into frames and grids of information with a skeuomorphic impression of religious wonderment. It is no coincidence that devotional paintings contain the same figurative depth as a iPad screen. If today's painting is in a bad way it is because in its backtrace search for new relevance in historical modes it rutted itself at proto-modernist and surrealist modes (perhaps confusing that as its beginning) - historical points having higher covalence with advertising than with the slowly dawning hegemony of the interface which contains it. Though some have done well, Koether, Euler, Cerletty, Kelm, von Heyl in adopting a sort of hyper-link representation.
But so,  J. Ceccaldi's Giotto blue and Manga/comic forces narrative frames read, conveying information, read as individual bits, the modern day christ figure in non-binary life state taken down from no cross magically superseding death and without a Madonna to wipe him, Subway Cumrag.


See too: Ray Yoshida at David Nolan

“Room & Board & Crate & Barrel & Mother Vertical” at Midway Contemporary Art

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Delivered with the PR's concepts as talking points, Arakawa's content delivery system continually refreshes itself through chameleon adoption of the background artists and cultures upcycled into its staging system under the spotlight of Contemporary Art, a system in which the production of artistic meaning is itself made clear as a series of gestures and movements that encode work with whatever aura is distinct to contemporary art separate from the objects subsumed. Anyone could play along at home. Arakawa may or may not have instigated the current trend for dancing in front of paintings as a means to accredit them, but he was the one to make it the focal point, and while everyone wants to go back to Gutai, Arakawa didn't need the paint as sediment of the action still mechanistically marking the authorial hand, the semio-social spirit would embed itself without touch.


See too: Karl Holmqvist and Ei Arakawa at Overduin & Co., And so Quarterly has finally come to pass.

Seth Price at 356 Mission

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Text saved Price's cutouts and vac-forms' vacancy by filling them with the aerosolized thought preceding it, dispersion to fill the empty packaging, naming the very thing Price's objects were at that moment doing. As the joke become boring Price again preceded the malaise attaching to it a novel with the critique already in hand explaining - in Price's elegantly mechanical prose - that Price had become a deterministic automaton in highly codified and symbolic trade-show of art where the good could be synthesized and produced like any other commodity as long as one understood the game that Price could all too knowingly lay out very well in the very-non-fiction auto-narrative look back on his then ripening career producing the good, highly collectible objects that looked just vacant enough to be salable all too clear to the viewers of this exhibition and those thoughts already thought for you, again the title to hang about you, Fuck Seth Price.

Roger Hiorns at Annet Gelink

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The Jewel-crusted success of Hiorns sulfate sculptures almost eclipsed the less fabulous concoctions-as-representations for the surfaced body. Here the latex skins on polycarbonate panels - looking like congealing soup, e.g. Kristeva's abjection: breakdown between subject and object - the goo and strata of flesh and bone, and the machinic body ejaculating foam at the mouth, Hiorns wild material divergence always expressed in dualities, steel and perfume, machine and foam, boy and fire, boy and gratuitously hulking aircraft engine, the bodily soft always set against its cold hard master, rigid and pliance, occasionally providing a mild erosion of that order, a strange and insistent fetish that we all seem to enjoy.


See too: Henrik Olesen at Reena Spaulings, Erwin Wurm at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Cathy Wilkes at Kunstmuseum Linz, Valerie Snobeck at Essex Street, Andro Wekua at Sprüth Magers

Richard Aldrich at Gladstone Gallery

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Aldrich's befuddlement of the terms and conditions of paintings makes for obtuse, tangential starts digressing from those painting histories generally acceptable as beginnings. If the paintings seem facetious or frivolous it is because Aldrich doesn't necessarily venerate the histories that are painting cannon, and so which attaching almonds to a painting is not only a thing to do but becomes naturalized as a term of painting - possibly - as all the talk of flatness once was, to be premised as a deduction of the ontological structure of painting rather than some rhetorical hubris, and the distance between the hypothesized normative frame of, say, almonds versus accepted flatness/expression/etc. as premise for painting, and the continual and spiraling versions as potentially acceptable fundamentals of painting and the ones in the book and the distance between these things.

Amy Sillman at Sikkema Jenkins

Amy Sillman at Sikkema Jenkins

A tragic affair collectors seek "signature" pieces, a signature piece requisite the artist already having a signature and thus emptied of its origination, adolescence, nubility and becoming etc, that Sillmans work, generally, seems about. A signature painting means "in the style of oneself" which sounds affected and self-conscious in a way popular 8 years ago that we thought Sillman had absorbed and moved us past, but here we are: "becoming" is literalized in the animation cell paintings, painting subordinate to precedent and subsequent - provisional - another painting-buzz Sillman had once passed. The most becoming paintings here are the small ones in which the self seems at stake, no Sillman line to hold the Sillman form she once insisted the body-politic of, instead a sort of becoming Frankenthaler, an interesting thing for Sillman to become someone else, not-Sillman.


See too: Amy Sillman at Kunsthaus Bregenz

Lili Reynaud-Dewar at Clearing

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Tom Cruise dancing in his underwear and socks in parent's vacated living room performed a magnificent version of freedom despite imprisonment by the script contractually obligating his "freedom" dancing "unwatched" in stark white briefs before an audience of - who really could have predicted then - hundreds of millions. This tension of contractually obligated freedom is a general one of art and a specific one for Lili Reynaud-Dewar for whom being naked in exhibition spaces never seems to come with freedom but rather an artistic obligation to somehow perform within these spaces where freedom's intimacy is subordinated to the transactional obligation of performance implying a requisite meaning/"artistry" to the body and movements to be fulfilled, which Reynaud-Dewar does painted red dancing.

“History Made By Artists” at Clearing

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These artists create history one by crafting an atemporal artifact, another evincing sedimented layers of waste as time markers, and another by writing a poem for the possibility of. But really they create it through the exhibition's reverence towards it. History only exists when it is cared for, or else it just disappears, and so artists treat it with a tender weightiness, with a disproportionate amount of veneration, a wide berth.

Juha Pekka Matias Laakkonen at Corvi-Mora

Tobias Kaspar at Silberkuppe

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The trend for newfound ultra-reflective fabrics - in which trendsetting punk bands were even using its image for logos - was at least in some way attributable to the meme-like spread of how cool it looked to take photos of your friends in, ghostly clothing disembodied in empty blackness if you remember, collapsing its marketing vehicle into the very fabric of its product, a feature people would want to disseminate outperforming the logo it made primitive. None of this is lost on Kaspar who has been gliding between fashion-as-art and just-plain-art, just-plain-art mirrored in the silvered rise of other painters reflective own, fashions which for the moment the flash can be frozen look great.

“Seven Reeds” at Overduin & Co.

Carol Rama at Isabella Bortolozzi

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Johanna Burton: "A vibrant, nasty, eccentric, erotic, corporeal, and irrefutably feminine (one might say feminist) wrath is everywhere visible in Rama’s oeuvre, yet hers is hardly piss without pleasure." Yet Bortolozzi's several exhibition insistence on the chaste, if not austere, abstract and incorporeal Rama complicates the narrative of a one-track artist. It could be a totally different Rama.

Josef Strau at House of Gaga

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Strau’s concurrent rise with the hegemony of art's image (say, CAD) makes a sense. Text attached to image delaying consumption of object as image, of the dumpy intentionally inconsequential sculpture (lamps), couldn’t be more important. Everyone was talking about painting beside itself while the image was being consumed in ever accelerating means, and Strau attaching text to image, delaying reception by anachronistically giving word to its reception at the moment it made it consumable without giving it away. This was huge. Like Harrison’s semiotic diaspora it delayed finality of its consumption even as it was made immediate.

Julia Rommel at Overduin & Co.

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A system of indexes parading painting's material as flesh flaunted, the overt material presence is at the same time excused by the "accidental," the means of composition providing reason for the material to be there, i.e. they're artifacts of a process so we're not reading into the color field emotions of the capital P Painter (of say Marden, Diebenkorn, Rothko) but as the residuals of painting's means which provides relief from capital M Meaning (Parino, Hesse), the great relief of things just being, or trying their hardest to.

see too:Lucy Skaer at Murray Guy, Daniel Lefcourt at Blum & Poe, Alicja Kwade at Kunstmuseum St. Gallen