Derek Fordjour at Night Gallery

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The uniform, the fanfare, the confetti and costumes all covering the brown support. Something doesn't sit quite right with these, no? The rosy glass peered through as a pervasive decorative function, a nostalgia that doesn't quite align? The prep school outfits, the white gloves. The lovely color looked through. Something.

Gracie DeVito at TIF SIGFRIDS

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Like Bonnard's rags, we like paintings looking picked from studio floors, rubbed with, spilled on, rather than painted, instead congeal a sentience from captured artistic sneezes, gestures. Though these are a lot nicer than the usual strains of scatalogical nappies of the enacted idiot-savant, of say Joe Bradley, of the real base impulses collected. And framed. Which, the frame had once aggrandized its painting haloed, now, redundant to white walls, to the cost of real estate, the frame cartoonifies, ironizes, self-deprecates in the goofy expense of custom routed framing: each an individual like a thumbprint or a mess. Frames are dumb if necessary, and these admit to that, a sort of excusing itself by way of clown. "Oh this red nose?, no."


See too: Calvin Marcus at Clearing, Trevor Shimizu at 47 Canal, Trevor Shimizu at Rowhouse Project

Pedro Wirz at Longtang

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We all fear for lumps inside us, unchecked growth, a malignancy, "matter out of place," "the contaminated diversities that proliferate in the dump." Fear of toxins, poisons, heavy metal build-up, of heavy concentrations of micro-plastics in the great Pacific beverage, in parts per million, in tumors, cysts, in bisphenol A, BPA's estrogenic symptoms to counteract the now "natural" amounts of viagra in rivers, our vessels leaded with a new Rome, our castrati and fears dispersed, pl, everywhere and nowhere. These things are bioaccumulative, they add up in sediments in your blood, fat, balls, turning the frogs "gay."

A lot of art brandish, monument, these fears into nervous objects:

See too: Pamela Rosenkranz at Karma International, Nancy Lupo at Antenna Space, Michael E. Smith at Atlantis

Doris Guo at Bodega

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"mementos of that sentimentally thick effect of decor working socially called 'ambience.' Bottled atmosphere ferments..."

Sculpture as an image, like Mander's Nocturnal Garden Scene (who make Louise Nevelson seem underrated), beneath Spoerri's table settings, the underneath, the legs become the portal, cavern, the place we spent time as children, under what holds the adult's Morandis, in the nocturnes, in the maw, against mother's legs clutched, we found worlds in forts constructed, in makeshift boxes, a certain heat to the darkness. We're not really allowed under the tables anymore, so of course the magic trip stops halfway.
Surrealism sure, but striking.


See too: Gertrude Abercrombie at Karma

Jose Zuniga at Central Fine

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Gaugin covered his pedophilia in colors more tasteful than the brashness of van Gogh or even Cezanne. Perhaps erupting in syphilitic sores made promiscuous color seem gratuitous, requiring some restraint, some decorum. A fear of wonton rashes expressing itself in total palette control. And so Gaugin's color is academic, goody two shoes, annoying.
The obvious Schutz references probably have as much to do with who is being stolen from as anything, and its nice to see things stolen.

Tomma Abts at The Art Institute of Chicago

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The monastic adherence to a form could become its own gratification, refusal, a withholding that feels like control over its pleasure. Or the canvases' ascetic ground a soil ripe for tilling. Instead the cut corners of mild invention placidly chose neither, shaped with a sorta-not-sorta-evolution for the form. It's a wildly unexciting development, threatening the whole enterprise with its contaminant arbitrariness, the whole hermetic tight-ass pleasure suddenly loosed with an open cavity. You can't cut the paper in origami, and if you did, you would expect results better than this. And perhaps then that is the point, of a relaxed attitude or orifice, a bit more air in the room, the painting, unlike a well made chair, doesn't need to stand up, because it will do so under scrutiny to call that air its fourth leg, painting is in fact arbitrary, we can hope for nothing else, even if we had hoped for something else.

Mario García Torres at Walker Art Center

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CAD presentation of Garcia Torres's work whose loss of the requisite information contained in didactics jettisoned, the info sent asea that would have allowed any remotely complete picture (since the GT's is often the oral myth of the didactic anyway), itself becomes a GT work for its, again, circumcision of the package, a clipping omission that refuses whole narrative. There's information missing, and you can fill it with whatever,  a hole we call poetic. A group of scientists thought that perhaps the best way to spread messages intergenerationally into the future, past the reaches of language, was not simple symbols like skulls for death, but rather to create a myth, in this case a fear of glowing cats. Whether or not the cats glow in the future doesn't matter, the point is the scientists were successful because I'm telling you now.

K.r.m. Mooney at Altman Siegel

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Cady Noland's handcuffs were jewelry for metallized wrists, about how we attach people to a world. A pearl sets off the clavicle. SFchronicle called them "spiritless" after getting it correct that"their relationship to the body is part of the art." And the gallery wears them, their wreckage as jewels. Lack the imagination to see the institution as the digestive body that it is. The engraving block shown here is intended to anchor small fine things to the earth. So they can be manipulated into delicate forms. Here - without its rubber base - untethered, a listless buoy weighted. In the other room copper bite plates allow you an orthodontics to ground yourself in the case of electrical storm as well as wear the institutions like bling: the white walled architecture clenched to your teeth like a grill. Some of Paul Wall's grills cost $30,000 but these walls cost more.

See too: Lucy Skaer at MRAC, K.r.m. Mooney at Pied-á-terre

“J A N U A R Y” at dépendance

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Paintings we bruise to reestablish some body, flesh, into the cartoon that has become pervasive, some hematoma between the lines inked to delineate ourselves. We don't want to be cartoons. Our bodies, paintings, can't take hammers like a liquid cat can.

Luís Lázaro Matos at Bastide Projects

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Hockney's pools had a sort of nostalgia without yellow, but a bleaching sun and chemical blue stripped it to bone, something almost caustic, which becomes the threat of sharkbite here. That Stranger by the Lake vibe, something so pure clean with an undercurrent, predators in the water, eels under clothes, all the things a beach provides. Sort of like a gym sock.

Past: Karl Haendel at Susanne Vielmetter

"Like the intricate engravings underpinning currency by making its redrafting more labor-time-intensive than it's worth, drawing authenticates with technical prowess to render sight as detail, having seen. Mostly. And the interview with the HD videod sex-offender is also an act of sight or seeing. Technologic reproduction acceptable alongside an "unedited" interview which replaces the ostensible "life" that these drawing contain? The computer reproduces without seeing, the obvious fear of someone striving to assimilate a machine without actually being it."


Read full: Karl Haendel at Susanne Vielmetter

Jasmin Werner at Kunstverein Braunschweig

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Conveyance. Ascension. Production, factory movement. The treadmill of life. The most addicting games create a continuous feeling of accelerating acquisition, slow steady rates of increase, of moving up in the world, and this little souvenirs of. Staircases like trophies to tomorrow.  The spiral staircase is just a hamster wheel over time.


Calla Henkel & Max Pitegoff at Cabinet, Nora Schultz at dépendance , Nora Schultz at Reena Spaulings, Grayson Revoir at Frankfurt am Main

Emma McMillan at Édouard Montassut

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The last paintings physical excavations becomes the press release's here mining color for all that can be applied to its painting. You apply content like a paint. Surfaces coated with a content the PR spray, the painting merely facets it, polishes its painted PR like a jewel,

“Concertissimo Annullato” at Thalys

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There used to be myth now replaced with defintion panapitcon of all these screen's two-way glass. In the future everything will be an exhibition. All the metaphors of transfer and speed.

Matt Paweski at Park View/Paul Soto

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Somewhere between Richard Rezac, Fecteau, and Kobro, the fantasy of the machine, that thing that serves us. Of course something erotic about that. A table accepts your feet on it, the meat grinder barfs sausage by the mile, generates. A complaint-less subservience, erotic. The microwave, more than reheated food, offered the fantasy of an inch toward paradise. It is a slave. Think of the fetish for horsepower, for ponies under the hood, under your feet, control. The machine sub to its dom. These look purposed. Look like other things vaguely. As their power. "the elusive mechanisms of interpretation" any object blurrying suggestion for the function they provide (to us) produces an uncanny effect. We say they look otherworldly, alien, simply because we don't know what good they are to us. They appear designed but without a purpose we can ascertain. We are so accustomed to objects bent to our service that appearing without purpose we call alien. The power of the uncanny is to teach us what we expect from certain forms by removing the parts that would cause recognition, replaced with mystery, potential, of what it could possibly do. For us.


See too: Richard Rezac at The Renaissance Society, Richard Rezac at Isabella Bortolozzi, Vincent Fecteau at greengrassi

Andrei Koschmieder at Jenny’s

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"But I sculpted the banality so accurately!" cries the painter of life. "A mimesis so exact it enacts the drear it represents!" They look like turds, the expellings of capitalist markets finally manifesting all those environmental externalities of the jet-set as piles of shit we imagine their tons of exhaust to be. Like the nightmare of our coming dystopia. Future scrappers, know at least that we could envision our own demise. Alex Israel just announced his complicity with Rimowa luggage days ago with, you guessed it, luggage depicting the clear skies that no air travel is helping. Ironic sure, but not the first: "Olafur Eliasson designs 46 nature-inspired luggage stickers for RIMOWA"  Jenny's has a thing for futurological drear, and CAD is supporting it because they don't all look like this, and all the questions as to why in moments of our dire circumstances further manifest visions of it. "Target fixation" a psychological phenomenon when the "individual becomes so focused on an observed object (be it a target or hazard) that they inadvertently increase their risk of colliding with the object" and the motorcyclist intent on avoiding the guardrail cannot look aways, sends himself flying over it. Or an airplane pilot, understandably.

Park McArthur at MoMA

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Imagine this space as an apartment. With a sort of Asherian bend to the institution as material, reflecting its navel for it to self assess. But whereas the historical genre had been content to hold up broad mirrors, McArthur's is a little more pointed if not necessarily legible. Like a monochrome, like a Robert Ryman the white constant pushed interest to the peripheral, attachments, names, edges and construct of its medium, context.

"Let’s begin with a description of the area where McArthur’s exhibition is located. The 4th floor space is rectangular and has 2 entrances connected by a spacious hallway. Depending on which way you enter, the sound of automated glass doors opening and closing arises to your left or to your right. These doors lead to other galleries. [...] As you face the windows, there is a long white wall to your right. Up high on the wall, close to the windows, grey letters in the same style as The David Geffen Galleries spell out: The Werner and Elaine Dannheisser Gallery. The Dannheissers gave most of their art collection to MoMA, and this 4th floor gallery bears their names. The Projects series, of of which this particular exhibition is a part, was re-named the Elaine Dannheisser Project Series in 2006 in honor of Ms. Dannheisser. 

The description of the almost terminally boring museum spaces (museological architecture an exercise in steroidal-elegance through omission) is either comedic for the dry descriptions of things  generally ignored or necessary for its recognition of things of what we have the ability to ignore. Leave the path and encounter "terrain." Suddenly the land, the hike, becomes difficult, experience nature differently depending on you ability to move through it. Would mountains have been still beautiful to the Donner party trapped within them?  We can mostly ignore things until they become a problem for us as a major theme of McArthur. Reading about all the elegant facilities of 53W53 feels like brambles.

“Still Life” at Rüdiger Schöttle

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The still life early in its history had already embraced its subjects "natural mortality" far before Sontag called photography an elegiac art stayed against death as if painting had already embraced it, this ability to carry itself forward. This provides the sentimentality, that care placed for what wished to hold like keepsakes. de Rooij's dying but replenished bouquets back their sentimentality on the burned capital to maintin them, asininely. But most art is content to package its precious moments in whatever porcelain taken for medium. You can embalm the world after all.


See too: Willem de Rooij at Arnolfini

“Prati bagnati del monte Analogo” at Neuer Essener Kunstverein

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We all desire pastoral landscapes of the mind. Our brains filled with air and breeze and clean air and not fritzed electrical haywiring of modern signal overload, our heads like honey poured into a toaster on a world turned to stimulants, advertising, notifications, likes, news reels, and the raw garbage of information, images, neon light to simulate 24/7 daylight. And so our paintings conjure the possibility of an otherwise like a surrealism. Empty heads.

Eric Sidner at Deborah Schamoni

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The stupid logic running through, circles and lumps, allowing for the transposition between themes, a snow man’s belly button transmutes to. Gaze into navel and


Autumn Ramsey at Park View, Autumn Ramsey at Night Club, Alice Tippit at Night Club