Bendt Eyckermans at Carlos/Ishikawa

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"the kids grown on cartoons have arrived and their childhoods have coincidentally, absurdly, become the accurate depictions of the way the world has begun to feel"

Dramatic like theater kids, and a light that is. Like maybe a few others, Keegan Monaghan or Gijs Milius etc., the pathos found in the real rendered as leather, our substance as a mistake. The joke perhaps that surely we are not made of mere goo, able to be "abstracted" as gore, stretched as idiots, bodies like foibles. This would, if true, if we are accurate as cartoons, identify with such, be eternally sad. Eyckermans' seems to be that closer it can vacillate between positions of "realness" and "melodramatic goo" (El Greco as comedy) the more we might feel to physically identify with such absurdity. A line between drama and stupidity that is the world currently, and so paintings to realize it.


see too: Gijs Milius at Gaudel de Stampa

Rebecca Brewer, Rochelle Goldberg at Oakville Galleries

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our desire for a materiality comes at the hands of world we increasingly do not touch. And so art must become a hyperstimulus; art must make us, perverts of novelty, feel something through glass, by sight, because our hands have been removed to a world we touch only through electrified track pads, through eyes, through a world like advertisement. And art, for all its self-segregation, increasingly must compete with entirety of visual diaspora, entering into mass cultural networks, instagram and webpages becoming its channels, same as all the other. The gloss of Artforum is now a forlorn beacon in comparison. How does art compel belief in its higher order. We now compete with actual images of dead oiled fish. Art excesses itself, crusts, proofs its real.

Rémy Zaugg at Nordenhake

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Conceptual art's withdrawal as a form of authority, denial as a form of strength, austerity to prove control, an iron grip of anality. The fissure immaculately conceives something tight enough to be mistaken for diamonds. The bureaucrat dressed in white suddenly looks like a doctor, and latex hands prove reason for his digging. Attempts to confuse the situation by making you the subject.


see too: John Knight at REDCAT, John Knight at Cabinet, John Knight at Greene Naftali

Frieda Toranzo Jaeger at Galerie Barbara Weiss

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Images latent in our expectations. "complicating the minimalist mantra of 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 tanned, taught, naked man."
Our products look like sexual objects.


See too: Vincent Fecteau at Misako & Rosen, Jana Euler at dépendance,

Ann Veronica Janssens at Micheline Szwajcer

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Art may be stupid, but the universe might be worse: arbitrary. Occasionally things click and the world briefly goes dark. A universe at large enough scales like clockwork. That we view through lenses wet with glass. The phenomenological that seems an attempt to reason with meat watching these big careful clocks.


Ann Veronica Janssens at Bortolomi, Ann Veronica Janssens at Micheline Szwajcer

Tobias Kaspar at Peter Kilchmann

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Folding fashion into art should seem to cause a nebulous hole to erupt, a singularity, the whole thing en abyme and vertiginous, distinctions collapse and the thing torn open for questioning. But it just looks like art.


see too: Tobias Kaspar at Silberkuppe

Sophie Thun at Sophie Tappeiner

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Forensic or creepy photo lab guy, you implicated in eyes looking back, our hands all over these eyes distinctly not from page 7 of the Victoria's secret catalog but something far more fragile, wounded or capable of. Not really much of the erotics of Paul Sepuya's, more like that Sky Ferreira album art that made people so uncomfortable. Uncertain, our relation. That Anne Collier structural cleverness that everyone seems to love.  Like Roni Horn's You are the Weather, the ever slight variations in a human face are alone more than enough for an artwork, face's ability to crumple, wither, and smooth itself in expression. Hand manipulate them to be so.

Nikolas Gambaroff at Schiefe Zähne

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As far as drab shows, this one designates the criteria, midcareer artist shooting himself in the foot to prove the town he's still capable of blood, thought. You have to be righteously in awe. Unsure whether to be happy with the lack of convertibles and toupees or designate this as artistic such.


See too: Nikolas Gambaroff at The Kitchen, Nickolas Gambaroff at Galerie Meyer Kainer

Gillian Carnegie at dépendance

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A sort of carving Euan Euglow by way of Vilhelm Hammershøi, an Arrangement in Grey and Black the number one thing is the references we could pile upon these. Peppered with Sphinxes whose riddle must be answered, painting. And us all tossing darts at meaning. Carnegie's slow career to worlds with no light, almost shadowless worlds reticent, seen in distant silver. All those butts and suns previous and no one makes a Bataille joke. Two reviews from the time instead horrifically conclude with allusions to the artist being "in the mood," the other having "the arrogance of a girl; one who knows how to get you off, when to put out and when not." No wonder Carnegie went indoors, away from the light's "ignoble shaft" "the indecency of the solar ray." Instead something mercurial, resistant to hands, and thus why all the writing on Carnegie is pretty much awful, this. Simon Thompson's letter at least refuses to attempt manhandling the situation, with and not at. If what Mayweather did was easy, all boxers would do it. Withdraw as a form of iconoclasm, luminous in rejection. How annoying to wither, die, under the mockery of a cat's impassion.


See too: Luc Tuymans at David Zwirner, Thomas Eggerer at Richard Telles, Caleb Considine at Daniel Buchholz, Caleb Considine at Massimo de Carlo, Venice: Victor Man at The Central Pavilion

Frank Stella at Marianne Boesky

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People love to invoke Walter Robinson's quote: "I admire Stella because he is making the ugliest art it is possible to make today.” Which, maddeningly cannot find the original source for this quote since the padding around it seems to matter. Because admittedly, the staggering asininity is their joy. They are like a clown exploding diagrammatically, intestines like silly string. The clown dies. But Stella's are essays in permanence. Matthew Strauss grammed all the various bird shit/piss on these that they will weather, because there isn't anything you could smear on these to make them better or worse, like a clown. And also like a clown, if a tumor is unchecked growth of a body, Stella's seem the unchecked growth of "creativity." Moles everyone has an opinion on whether we need them checked out. Which pretty sure is like a clown. Which pretty sure is a metaphor the these, some type of unchecked growth, clowning. These belong in the banks lobbies you see them in, absurdifying the notion of taste, of unchecked growth, all the clowns they let past security.

The lumpy, crusty, has become an almost exhausting form. The play dough, the bulbous form which embodies a sort of embryonic potential of "creative act," and vessels for. The lumpy is an excess which proves the artist, showcases their hand. Replacing the drip as the new expressive. Things droop, we bloat. We got the -itis, some form of inflammatory disease. Pimply like we're pubescent, cute, like at any day the potential of our maturity, almost uncanny.

Joanne Greenbaum at Richard Telles

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the confusion of painterly terms, parsing the difference in Greenbaum's marks between accident and expression, calculated or automatism. The categories get blurry, Sherman Sam: "which in another era would have been construed as the struggle between the intellect and the romantic." But Greenbaum seems to defy more categories in regurgitating expressive modes, flaunting its social codes like any good hysteric would. The hysteric was made to believe they were irrational, crazy, but they were, really, simply not fitting into the the mores of stifling polite company, even Pollock's "expression" contained within "painting" but these are always teasing something that we might find repulsively not-painting, irrational.

Vincent Fecteau at Misako & Rosen

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The muscle car was - if by name alone - intended to resemble a body. Exuded the "muscle" it contained, sleek and rippling with. The image seeped into culture and the fast cars took on different appearances, insectoid, technical. But those muscled images remain latent, in the cultural ether, and Fecteau seems to pluck and rearrange some subconscious forms of these chopped and reassembled, looking like something you vaguely recall but can't place. Like a google algorithm trying to invent a car part, like a human recalling some vague sexual attachment to a physical objet before understanding what a body was for.

Josef Strau at House of Gaga

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Well, they're pretty in a crushed can on the street sorta way, or a butterflies broken in the gutter, angels compressed into glitz souvenirs. Pretty in that any sorta silver sort of way, like shiny things be. Pretty in a "why?" sort of way. The way butterflies seem garish and unnecessary to a world and inspire our wrath so children crush them and artists crush them against canvas, looking for ways to bejewel our production, steel it against the unpleasant taste of mouths eating coin. They're fine in that way of pleasantness, pinnacle of subservience that is the crux of high dollar abstraction, submission to their surroundings by letting it walk all over them.


see too: Josef Strau at House of Gaga

Jana Euler at Galerie Neu

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Images a total malleability, and we revel in its mud. No longer Euler's symbolist nesting dolls, now paintings more like a mirage, shifting muck of material images, and so uncertain about whether that shark officially looks like a cock or if that's just you. Innuendo as resistance to stable images, a sort of conceptual abstraction for your walls. The latent phallus, that we see in every painting.


See too: Jana Euler at dépendance,  Jana Euler at Galerie Neu & Portikus, Jana Euler at Kunsthalle Zürich, Jana Euler at Bonner Kunstverein

Julian Charrière and Julius von Bismarck at Sies + Höke

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"'We are not going to comment further on the videos other than to say it appears the goal of these individuals was to mislead the public; and in the process they wasted valuable resources,' the DNR statement said. 'That’s unfortunate and doesn’t warrant further comment.'"

Okay new rule: "generating a conversation" is no justification for an artwork. And all the other various PR speak of "raising awareness" "critical discussions" or whatever various cliches excusing art that gadflies into consciousness. A wooden splinter  raises awareness of your thumb, stupidly. These PR cliches that we begin to think in, think of art as, the same blanket excuse attempted in recent controversies like Schutz's painting or the gallows displayed in the art museum's park "beginning a conversation"; this odd belief in art's inherent morality like a get-out-of-jail-free card like all those youtubers yelling "it's just a prank" and art's claim to "It's an artwork." A more interesting question than of real and fake is at what point something is an artwork and at what point its just people behaving disingenuously in the public sphere.

Paul Lee at Karma

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Painting is a tambourine, I guess, is the point here. Imagine touching the painting, imagine beating it in 4/4. "However, Lee subverts this with a design to imply restraint and to create a sense of longing in the work. These tambourines will not be touched and will not make a sound—their potential for movement or rhythm is only possible through a pictorial plane." I guess like all handmade art eventually hung on walls, only ever now touched through gloves or sight, it is a sort of sad existence after all the grunting love of the painter stretching the canvas, rubbing it with oils, or whatever. Somebody cared once, paintings like ashtrays of that touch.


see too: Paul Lee at Maccarone

Yuki Kimura at Jenny’s

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A means of physicalizing the otherwise digital nonexistence of video, a brilliant adaption to package and sell televisual color, all the brilliance TVs advertise held in crystal. A slipperiness to Kimura's, objects or photos whose concreteness or hopes for singularity or individuality has a tendency to bleed. Glass which we don't really see but for its reflection, or flaws, it only warbles a world surrounding it, refracts what we put through it. Photos of brandy glasses usually are shot in the white cloud of virtuality to reduce the room, whereas these are built to hold it.


see too: Yuki Kimura at Wattis

Fred Wilson at Maccarone

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A lot of trauma is artistically represented in umbers and scabs, crust, decay. But there is trauma in silver work. In wealth, chandeliers, just beneath their polished surface there is the some backing beneath. Horrible things have happened in the name of chandeliers, of decadence.

Haim Steinbach at Tanya Bonakdar

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in the world as a whole that these objects exist next to each other is the tension. What keeps them apart otherwise? And displayed totemically, museologically, almost ask for the academic papers and thoughts that should separate them. The great breadth of stuff. A mixing we find almost anxious. And we forget how much Darren Bader owes to Steinbach, nervousness in plain things.

Egan Frantz at Neuer Aachener Kunstverein

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"Yes, any painting which is any good looks strange in the beginning — bad ones too!, comes to the defense of analogizing’s weakness."

Presaging your paintings misunderstood, unappreciated in their own time. Getting ahead of the story, an important part of any PR campaign but usually you let the dealer do that, not the title of painting, and what level tongue approaching cheek, hard to tell. Not quite the stupendous iron-fist-stupidity of Kippenberger's titles (and painting as excuses for them), or the so painfully played straight writ of Carpenter. More like an apologetics, an excuse me, for the brown faux pas currently being committed. Call it shit, but aha, excuses already in order, I intended to.

Steve Bishop at Kunstverein Braunschweig

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Nostalgia a toxic substance used to preserve our memories in formaldehyde's rose tinted veil. New research shows that nostalgia is actually the brain's way of combating negative feelings and nihilism, it is basically the brain self-administering drugs in the form of a memory, recalling a time when one did feel comfortable, safe, happy, as a means to hopefully jumpstart its human and face whatever adversity. Nostalgia's "bittersweet" highlighting the person in a continuum of time and thus progress made.

“If you can recruit a memory to maintain physiological comfort, at least subjectively, that could be an amazing and complex adaptation,” he says. “It could contribute to survival by making you look for food and shelter that much longer.” -Dr. Wildschut, nytimes

 Bishop's seem like medical grade injections of nostalgia. Like leftover cake, nostalgia is an artificially sugary concoction we can bring with us, a souvenir that, like Gober's donuts, we desire forever. Nostalgia is how we laminate our heads to look like there's more precious substances inside. We coat chairs in plastic to think they're worth preserving. This will all be gone soon.

Louisa Gagliardi at Rodolphe Janssen

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It feels more and more that everything is synthetic, made from the same substance, stuf. It feels like our world is comprised of at least someone's putty. We plan a world through virtualizations. Erect bathrooms on plans. Our bodies could be figured for their worth in tile. Tile is cost per square foot, you per hour. Everything exchangeable and thus equivalent, paying you in the going rate of Silly Putty you are made of. Everything a labor, you an object. We stretch you like cartoons at whims to an invisible hand market exchange. The developer sculpts his cities taffy, painters are left their devices.

Nora Turato at Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein

The objects blank but the walls screaming. Language is terror, a horror, means of authority.

The infectious insertion of a stranger's speech into yours: when I write "lake" the word appears in you, my voice for yours. Reading is like relinquishing control of thought to an author's temporary marionetting of yours. How odd that my words are a voice in your head. Reading is such an automatic mechanism. It is a base human disposition to "read" our environment, to make sense of our surroundings, and advertising takes advantage of this: a byline appears and before you can stop yourself you have read it, allowed it briefly to control you and its message has been passed, its transaction has been complete, and its sign depleted lifeless garbage. Artists soften this verbose assault by clipping meaning, leaving it to never complete a logic but hover incomplete and

Language: Hanne Lippard, Nora Turato at Metro Pictures, Tony Cokes at Greene Naftali, Matt Keegan, Kay Rosen at Grazer, Jessica Diamond at Team (bungalow)