Raúl de Nieves at Freedman Fitzpatrick

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Too much decoration is a terrible thing. We call it "gaudy" or "garish" or "lurid" or "vulgar" no longer arranged but vomited in quantity, too much, like the clowns on view who baroque their face to comical levels found frightening, a rupture of the socially decorous. Because these are ethnocentric terms, wielding the symbolic violence of "taste," and such it is rare museums didactic their greek statuary with "this greek marble would have actually been caked in makeup like a whore" preserving both the marble and myth of white antiquity. The myth of white antiquity that believes in the raw lineage that gives us aluminum Macbooks and UberBlack as opposed to the lesser Ubers which come in colors disorganized. Sontag wrote the word camp and it suddenly allowed the intelligentsia to participate in the kitsch with the shield of irony, but if you weren't, if you couldn't, what then if these were just garish.


See too: Joanne Greenbaum at Crone, Olaf Breuning at Metro Pictures

João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva at Andrew Kreps

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As if the several images of projectors illuminating gallery walls wasn't enough, we brandish the literal celluloid here to state "this is a physical object," a spell to ward off the anonymizing ether of digital networks that would, god forbid, force competition with every other image. Instead we wreath it, frames architecture filmstock perforations. Objects seem to almost fear their dispersion, fear their image against Instagram mass. Kreps website doesn't actually have the photos without their frames, that's a CAD exclusive perhaps ready for its close up. And the celluloid is labelled like a movie, time and all. Walls for protection. It's important to keep you distinct and the gallery in its resplendent pasture, separate from the polloi.

Janice Kerbel at greengrassi

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Typographic enunciation. Abstraction that get its content too - legible. All manner of questions in the difference between reading and looking. One is data processing, a systemized manner we have been trained specifically for. That though the "lake" in your head is not mine, we have quasi-equitable terms of exchange. And so you can disappear into a text, be "transported." Looking keeps you here, staring, what you are meant to do with that is up to you.  The difference between a serif or sanserifed "GRAB" is interpretable.  This "Grab" is fancy, that "Grab" is plain. The different garb we dress in. Despite comics' or Wool's long interest in such matters, these are dressed tastefully in tuxedos to match our white walls.

“The Myriad Forms of Visual Art” at The National Museum of Art, Osaka

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The strangeness of documentation that doesn't conform to the crystalline white of lighting. Everything looks primeval, like what we imagine museums at night, occult spaces of objects left to do what objects do when no ones looking. The museum seems closed, set in a forest. A warmth we usually enact through instagram filters or rose tinted glass. Like its the 90s. Covered in nostalgia. Now everything looks like porn, bleached and depilated.

Stuart Middleton at Carlos/Ishikawa

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Which like metaphor for the wrangling of the image, of forcing it out, Middleton's investment in manhandling the image, often laborious, stop motion, animations, of banal, finger-tapping, plain scenarios, extinguishing cigarettes in piss, show effort, weird flex but okay, hauled off to market, labor, means, a beautiful cow. What is a cow but a technology for meat production, surely kin to art.


Cow too: Wilfredo Prieto at NoguerasBlanchard, Aleksandra Domanović at Tanya Leighton

Aki Kondo at ShugoArts

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All we want is something painted. The ostensible white language of plainness is actually easy means to see the difference, what we're looking for anyway, the subject of painter rendered in the glass they see the object through, the errors of their mis-seeing. No one thinks bananas look like this, but a question of what was finished enough for acceptability here. See the flaws in the glass of another's eyes.

Sara Greenberger Rafferty at Rachel Uffner

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The need to rephysicalize the image, cut it from an ether that can edition itself, and instead localize it in a "unique object." It's a strange feature that you can endlessly multiply images of your world but you can't multiply gold. Glass printing valorizing the reference's assets, realizing profits. The world is dissolving anyway why not let it sink into its image.

“Various Others” at Deborah Schamoni

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Another Condo. You get to see other artists in a different space, which stands in for excitement. As a promotion machine it makes some sense, arranging a mass effort which garners some publicity, new sights, fresh air, collectors. If the gallery is a stop on the procession to history, legitimacy is an agreement between accredited actors. The fair may have accredited but, competitive, undermined the agreeable contract of networked legitimacy. We could just send artists anywhere and watermark their images with our, this different, architecture, our signature.

Christine Wang at Nagel Draxler Kabinett

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Stated aggressively but not necessarily pointedly at clear meaning, an irony that confuses instead of reneges. Their dripping disgust with an almost self-harm cruelty is also an earnestness in moral dubiety. What do these things mean, is of course the question every painting asks, these just do a lot more explicitly, ambiguously. Do I want a threesome with the Winklvii? Wouldn't it be nice to be rich, to have made it to the moon on Bitcoin? Is my now desire for threesome with the Winklvii merely a symptom, hoping for some relief from anxiety of capitalist precarity, their big arms? The questions come embedded in the image. The world, surely, is fucked. The newspaper is a surrealist device, atrocity competing with diamond ads. Against the majority of juxtapositional surrealists operating today who find themselves content in jumbling signs for subconscious irruption, these hand you the pile of garbage and ask you to find help in untangling it.

“The Vitalist Economy of Painting” at Galerie Neu

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The painting we all think needs some championing, some explaining. The pr retracts the title's seeming promotion of vitalism. In fact rightly says “The problem with vitalistic scenarios is their total failure to take the influence of external social and economic factors into account." and "proves to be mere wishful thinking, albeit a form of wishful thinking that is hugely appealing." Yet we get this, the artists in this exhibition don't so much do vitalism so much as do the usual "subvert them, retract them, or carry them to absurd lengths".  The attached booklet too reading more like a J Peterman catalog of art-patter copy to get you to buy than providing any further insight, blurbs about your a painting with an accredited art historian. Maybe the coming book has more. A sort of buy my book and this art too type of exhibition. Did any of these painters need critical help? Why do we treat painting with kid's gloves, art historians so kind to painting? Couldn't these paintings take a bit more cutting? Their market success on abusing vitalist premise that we hide under a security blanked called criticality, that there may be no real subversions, retraction, or absurdification only a gesture at it.


Click: “Painting: Now & Forever, Part III” at Greene Naftali & Matthew Marks

Ivy Haldeman at Downs & Ross

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The sexy hotdogs, as a friend said, but there's no hotdogs here. Yet the sex remains, latently.  Oldenburg innuendo slicked to the surface, in the stroke of the brush we could call lascivious. The same strokes that delineated super hero breasts comicly. In latex suits forming questions other comic artists posed as, "Is Amazon Girl's super power the ability to squeeze that figure into that suit?" Squeeze that meat into that casing. Besides a few hands, here the meat is removed, only the surface remains. The move from painting products to business suits perhaps stating an equivalent that's uncomfortable. Is the suit the product, or a surface of sex that sells? Or, maybe hotdogs weren't selling that well. "Our focus is on incremental volumes and mix improvements coming from new products." Because these are products. Eventually, the question of fitting into suits is answered with the perhaps empowering, "Nah, they can all do that."

Judith Eisler at Casey Kaplan

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A critique toward the pre-loading your brush with content, forcing its representing the priorly ordained, would seem unfair against today's every other painter evacuating it - though Richter and Tuymans bleeding out of their images content despite it, might provide the real answer to content re-presentation. And the PR's dance around the issue of this recycling - can't you just wait for a writer to invoke Hito Steyrl's "In Defense of the Poor Image" about these - instead rams that the point is the paint, whether to ward off any conceptual jabber or maybe bait it in review hard to tell. "Eisler questions whether light is a substance or a process." which weirdly enough is exactly a Quora question you can read click here. A weird worry that art is asking questions that science is answering. Which maybe is why we're asked to look instead at the paint that culture values in these.


See too: Luc Tuymans at David Zwirner

Simon Dybbroe Møller at CAC Vilnius

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Like a less stupid Bader, a less virally aggressive Wolfson. There is a surrealism undercurrent in the world turned into an image. You can kind of tease it, the world. Make it do things. Sort of tickle it into laughter. A running gag.

Sam Falls at 303 Gallery

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The whole premise of "process-based abstraction"'s ability to create souvenirs of experience you didn't have is premised on some vestigial trait of conceptual that may never have existed. I.e. does On Kawara painting "January 22nd 1988" on canvas actually mean anything outside a finger toward it.  Does an artist in the forest placing native plants on a canvas actually contain its sound? What information is stored? The signifier does not actually contain its signified, I thought we understood that. No cares seems to care where the canvas is wove, where the pigment is made; no we only care for the image which ostensibly means something, stupidly. Both "index" their world, other artists.

Stan VanDerBeek at DOCUMENT

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A photo of a projector. Two photos actually, of 19. While a video is provided, the photos are an assertion of your missing something, even of the object we usually ignore. An object photographed as totem to the distance between you and what you clicked to see.

Jasper Marsalis at Svetlana

(http://www.contemporaryartdaily.com/2018/10/jasper-marsalis-at-svetlana/)

A sort of scuzz painting. Skins like cigarettes clinging Guston lips. Brush strokes congealed. Drawing that heals like a scab. We love paint, not painting, and the trick is to get the paint on the canvas without the absurdity of "painting" and the brushstrokes that denote it, and so Marsalis seems to paint it with sticks, mold it like Kristevan flesh, like detritus, like eye goo.

See too: Ida Ekblad at Herald St

Channa Horwitz at Ghebaly Gallery

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It's maybe treating the arbitrary with such taut thin lines, with laborious specificity to chart chance - "aleatory openness" - in cryptography the sampling of physical phenomena is required for true random number generation. Noise. Which are charted in webs of delicacy. That information look. Corrections in the margins underscoring, by acknowledging the flaws pointing towards, the ideal they aspire to, that there even is an ideal, however far from it, even if irrational.

Michael E. Smith at Atlantis

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A google search says no one has used to word tumor in any online writing about Smith. Which seems odd, his objects seem awfully affected by a lot of weird malignant lumps, red dots, growths on institution and inflated with resin crusts. Teratomas are a specific type of tumor composed of tissues not normally present at the site, the classic hair and teeth twin in your tummy. You can google pictures of these, they actually look a lot like Smith's more "bodily" objects. Of growths without cause, find a potato in our eye, a DNA corruption, the "categorically promiscuous" things sliding into new subjects like bare knees across asphalt, so that black tar is becoming-blood, and knees ground becoming-asphalt. You can move between categories, your body could become alligator skin, claws inside you.


Michael E. Smith at 500 Capp Street Foundation, Michael E. Smith at Sculpture Center, Michael E. Smith at Michael Benevento, Michael E. Smith at Zero, Michael E. Smith at Lulu, Michael E. Smith at Susanne Hilberry

“Impulse Control” at Freedman Fitzpatrick

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an excess of content, dripping with it. titillation. touching the things we're not to speak of in company. One would like to think of art as a repository of such, but the rarity of these exhibitions says otherwise.

Julien Bismuth at Parisa Kind

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The PR would have you believe that Bismuth is painting faces into the inkblot patterns, adding a layer of personal subjectivity that we could construe as "meaning" rather than arbitrary symmetries. The symmetry we've all but been proven to find attractive and alluring and thus their inscutability matters none, we are attracted to something that can never provide the release of information instead only decoration. And while there may be information encoded in the whorls a fingerprint can only be identified, it cannot tell you anything about its finger, this is a only a lure, to design a blankness we desire. A serviceable PR.

Aaron Garber-Maikovska at High Art

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An alchemical blend of "dance, tai chi, sign language, and obsessive compulsive disorder" would seem a question the PR tries to answer of why they look just like "Cy Twombly, Joan Mitchell, and Brice Marden" a look that could be said to "situate his work within recognizable trajectories of abstraction," but that "it is not necessarily about borrowed legitimacy" - having now amassed the most common criticisms (besides markets we don't speak of) that many have stockpiled as problems against these- but then offering the solution: that these suggest that "for all the codification that takes place in culture, the essential lies in and just beyond our finger tips, in and beyond language, in the incommunicable." It's an interesting challenge to attempt their defense.

Monika Sosnowska at Gisela Capitain

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Totemizing wreckage as an ostensible reworking of trauma - or as the PR calls it, "poetic metaphor" for artifactual images of the "place's" political and social ideologies, remnant of the politics that wrought them  - would feel a bit more genuine if it wasn't so aestheticized by what we could call "the big shiny": its auto-declaration as Art, a gloss and arrangement that no one could mistake. Something had started to call it ruin porn, a stylized violence, like they actually ship the wreckage of 9/11 around to be gawked at, souvenirs of cruelty or imperialism, and often aestheticized. These you get to project your own fantasy disaster movie scene into.

Fernanda Gomes at Museo Jumex

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A series of decisions. Decision which prove intention, intention which becomes a perfume dispersing to all corners of the space. Our noses grow tired of perfume, of rooms, but this has a refresh rate: further and further compositionalizing the room into smaller and smaller sections, fractals, shrinking like that incredible man who finally tiny dissolves into the fabric of the space, everything becomes part of it, the space is "activated," and we are greeted to a total feng shui, everything has been touched. Everyone comments on Gomes's monochromism, painting stuff white, but really they're just seeing mirrors reflecting the walls.



See too: Oscar Tuazon at Le Consortium & Paradise Garage

Ed Atkins at dépendance

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"Members." A constituent, "a person, animal, or plant belonging to a particular group." or a "a part or organ of the body, especially a limb." Or, say, dismembered, cropped. Clip you like foreskins or fingernails, or your fingers, your legs under artistic amputation. But you can also be euphemized, your body metaphorized out from under you. As an innuendo, mistake your lumps for a phallus, say call you a dickhead, make you look like a member.  We could turn you into a statistic, a cancer rate.  We could say he is nice. We could make you into a joke.

Keith Farquhar at Cabinet

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It's about the latent. Like the trojan horse hiding in men's bicycle shorts armed to possibly hurt you from darkness. Looking like an IKEA catalog of art seems the point, cause crappiness is kind of the point.. "They dramatise an existential threat to notions of artistic sovereignty." Creep is "the tendency of a solid material to slowly move or deform permanently under the influence of stresses." But creep is also a man with his penis out under bike shorts. Things become embedded with connotation like a gym locker room is embedded with naked men. Conceptual austerity becomes filthy-with. Like content that can be applied, sticky. Clung to Chris Wool, like you peeled it off it. How children are sticky, their plastic like grime accumulators. Wood to absorb ass sweat. Symbols filled with things to gag you with. Cardboard like a sloughed flesh for transit. Thing "used," or going to be used. Things creep, and there is prevailing undercurrent of sex, perhaps "buggery," that runs under the work, like a goo spread.