Rosy Keyser at Parrasch Heijnen

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The secret to Keyser's paintings is that, beneath the scum and the janitorial chunder sponge, the fecal and snot rags like a mother's sleeve in winter, or the sock under boys' bed, they are just really generally pleasant paintings. Opening the tissue to reveal flecked orange magic. 

Magnus Frederik Clausen, David Ostrowski at Spazio Orr, Brescia

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The less you try the closer you are to getting something uninhibited, almost natural. You get raw wood, a brushstroke that looks free. Like it's not in a cage. Of course no one really thinks it is. But you maybe get to imagine it. 

see too: David Ostrowski at Sundogs, David Ostrowski at Jir Sandel

Yona Lee at Fine Arts, Sydney

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The objects of capital, our world, are strange enough. So they become the hieroglyphs of the gallery world, moved into cubes for contemplation. Artists perform the rituals. We glean a ritualized understanding. 

See too: Yona Lee at Fine Arts, Sydney

 Past: Yona Lee

"You can attach anything to anything today. A subway pole becomes a mop, runs plumbing, becomes lamp, attaches a table for when we're all stuck underground. The signs get slippery, confused (the thin difference between a barrier pole or a handrail.) This capitalist surrealism that seems inherent to our age - symbolic orders melt to some other demand. Efficiency - the invisible hand pressing everything into everything else, together, the same."

Yona Lee at Fine Arts, Sydney

Past: Judith Hopf 

"Each brick lain a decision by the artist to continue."

Read full: Judith Hopf at Museion, Judith Hopf at kaufmann repetto

Bradley Kronz at Lars Friedrich

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Kronz has shown everywhere, making the rounds, leaving an exhibition at every cool young space, once. Sorta like the work, unable tell where we're at, what scale we exist on. Is this a model for something, is this a representation, or is it an object? Everything happens only once. (Except for the time it happens 3 times.) Then it's off somewhere else. Never firm ground to stand on. A fun press release. Weird enough to be interesting, scrappy enough to leave you skeptical. A friend you can't form a relationship to.

see too: Manfred Pernice at Galerie Neu

Hamishi Farah at Fri Art

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Pusha T and Drake's longstanding beef ended with Drake having to release a statement admitting, yes, he was hiding a child and, yes, that was him in blackface. It exploded. People said Pusha took it too far. Drake vocally conceding the beef would have been less of an L than his hand forced in apology.  Beef was supposed to remain in the land of publicity grabbing headlines, in hyperreality, in the game. I.e. Children, etc., shouldn't be involved. Farah's own "going nuclear" would also involve children that should maybe be left out of the game's foibles. Do you see where this is going? For those seeking beef's reportage: After Schutz excused her razzle dazzled murdered black child through her relation as a mother, Farrah, no stranger to surgical summer, painted Schutz's child. It exploded. Farah's painting of the child was censored in Monopol, labeled an "act of revenge" (language seemingly no German paper used to describe Schutz's painting of someone else's child.) The jujitsu here is black belt. Returning all the stakes of painting - that artists are quick to claim in the same breath they claim to be outside of - into the real. The virtual sacrosanct of poised conceptuality - "in the game" of hyperreality - Farah is all too canny in, happy to, throw into the artistically hot water it supposedly was already boiling. Basically, if you want stakes in art, here are your stakes. This is isn't conceptual, these are people's lives, not necessarily all in the game. Not a game. Farah, reasonably, has beef. And there is more of it. His instagram, @merlincarpenter, documents another beef with none other than. Carpenter's once conceptually excused racist joke, that he seemingly would prefer to disappear, Farah continuously drags back into the mud of the real. 

Choosing a side in a beef is always part of the fun. And your choice here is going come with political questions on the limits of art's unquestioned terrain, stakes, Debord, and how much hyper faux reality we can take from rappers. But I fucking hate Drake.

Mathis Collins at Crèvecoeur

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Perviously there was a speaker for an eye, which makes a metaphoric sense for the haptic reversal of carving. Seeing a feel. The vibration of carving, a touch without. The labor dabbles the surface. While Guston's heavy belabored stroke plodded its anxiety, the sweat here seems less anxious than proof of work, not frivolous, not quite etched in stone, but heading there.

Ceal Floyer Massimo at Minini, Brescia

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Historical anti-retinal trends led to concerns with meaning, to an audience's battles with "getting it." Many things were written, both for and against. But eventually getting it was the prize, was the humor, conceptual art distilled to its simplest form, comedy. The set-up, delivery and a vast emptiness. But these begin toying with something different. Almost nothing to get, attempts at non-meaning, attempts on its life. Anti-thought art. A head "kept clear" with the sound of one hand clapping, masturbation pleasure.

 Past: Peter Fend

"Art has been co-opted for worse things than environmental boostering. Fend's utopic aspects seem nice if not necessarily utilitarian, but since when has art been confronted with actualities. Art is a space without expectations of internal success, of even internal logic. ... giving the boring problems of our coming environmental cataclysm at least ostensibly interesting solutions. ... ideas are less the feasible-solutions-for-actualization than they are acts of branding and dissemination, where being excited-for is itself the solution. Whether or not you feel excited is yours."

"... How can one invest in getting Musk to stop?..."

Read full: Peter Fend at Museo Nivola, Peter Fend at Embajada, Peter Fend at Essex Street

 Past: Ceal Floyer at Aargauer Kunsthaus

"...cleverness - the set-up, tension and click of conclusion- and its bathetic pull, "this interplay of expectation and disappointment." ... less fun than sinisterly aware of their exchange of the broken sad comedy of puns as like existentially it, this small disappointment threatening to replace understanding with "getting it," our world as a series of painfully dumb effects."

 Full: Ceal Floyer at Aargauer Kunsthaus

Ryan Huggins, Jacob Mason-Macklin at PAGE (NYC)

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First there was zombie figuration, now headlines declare Figuration Fatigue. No longer tired painting but tired viewers. The blame shifts. Our eyes weary. And it's true, there is a "diminished emotional responsiveness to a stimulus after repeated exposure to it." Ostensibly time will sort this out, but is it true? Or does first claimant get spoils. Looking new is often more important than being new. How many times has assemblage been rekindled by the fresh dumpsters outside artist studios, a new trash appearing different than Rauschenberg's? In a long enough view eventually everything might return to garbage, and we sort through it then I guess as artifacts. 

 Past: Alan Ruiz at Bad Reputation

 "... the displayed droppings of dominant culture, broken into artifacts, and presented it in our white altars to press heads against it. We used to draw aurochs on cave walls; we relocate the world into art, to make it manipulable in our realm, sandbox, aesthetics. To stand in for control. Aesthetics becomes the religion of fictionalized understanding. It substitutes its little problem for the one big problem. And therefore claims knowledge, and thus domain.
If the dominance of mass culture includes threat to diminish art, [a diminishing] that we could call castration, then art's transmuting that culture into fetish item is classic Freud: it is "a token of triumph over the threat of castration and a protection against it." i.e. You can't cut off what I own of yours."

 Past: Alan Ruiz at Bad Reputation

Past: Cathy Wilkes

"Since sculptural figuration’s wastelanding after modernism, its return in inhumanist impulse made sense in conceptual and post-minimal fallout. The humanist passe was instead fit into the acceptable accounting methods of the 60's ruling doctrine, e.g. Nauman’s uncanny serialization of it. It continued time and artist again until it started actually resembling the body reflected in cold capital, looking prescient for whole new reasons...."

full: Cathy Wilkes at Kunstmuseum Linz, Cathy Wilkes at Tramway

Past: Paul P.

"...There shouldn't be this much desire, resting on the surface, as if the surface itself exuded it [...] And P.'s structure become excuse to hang painting's flowers, blooms, cause shimmers in paint. Look how the painter's hand trembles. ...   factories for desire. The steam is hung by painter. ... Do these men sweat, or does the painter sweat for them? The glass of fashion. Desire placed on like a mask... the 'expression is from Page 18 of the Victoria’s Secret catalogue.'..."


Read full: Paul P. at Lulu & Queer Thoughts, Paul P., B. Wurtz at Cooper Cole

Lisa Williamson Amplifier Tanya Bonakdar, Los Angeles

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They're always like a half of a sculpture. Like the other part should be somewhere nearby. Like a piece pulled out of IKEA both, some assembly required. Something missing.

Srijon Chowdhury at Foxy Production

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Drip with meaning. Or glisten with it. The other one glows. That one prickles. Down there that one has firework flowers that burst with it. A moonglow to spotlight it. These are the painterly wreaths that halo meaning. Bestow objects a blessing. In a video game the object would hover and spin. In a novel, the detective would pull them from earth for a magnified look. The monolith us monkeys dance around, point at. They are the MacGuffin. The monolith only as meaningful as the plot/painting can ascribe it. The actual meaning is in this means to distribute meaning. 

See too: On the recurrence of symbolism, Gertrude Abercrombie at Karma, Gina Litherland at Corbett vs. Dempsey

Alexandra Noel at Antenna Space, Shanghai

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CAWD wrote the release for this. Go check it and the show. 

Past: Alexandra Noel at Freedman Fitzpatrick, Atlantis 

Teresa Baker at Pied-á-terre

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Crust composition, stitched twigs, punk weavings, arranging "painting" like a conductor waving his hands to conjure the cultural myth music. 

SIGNA at Simian & Angélique Aubrit, Ludovic Beillard at Centre d'Art Contemporain La Synagogue

(Simian, Cd'ACLS)

We had always predicted Wilkes to come back, but never expected its haunting to be literalized into performance. Nor in matching colors. Wilke's materialism no longer enough, we need stronger ghosts.  

see too: Cathy Wilkes 

Past: Joanne Greenbaum

"... gentility balanced with an undercutting maximalism, like a dog having found the birthday cake to lay it out once again on the patterned rug.

"the confusion of painterly terms, parsing the difference in Greenbaum's marks between accident and expression, calculated or automatism. The categories get blurry in regurgitating expressive modes, flaunting its social codes ... always teasing something that we might find repulsively not-painting, irrational.

"... the schizo positioning of painting today, in which everyone wants a subjectivity expressed but no one wants human expression. The hysteric is the ability for the human to appear through the grate of order; social, relational, capital, or artistic."


Joanne Greenbaum at Crone, Joanne Greenbaum at Richard Telles

Leda Bourgogne at QBBQ's

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Really got everything.

Gerrit Frohne-Brinkmann at Noah Klink, Berlin

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Little hosts, infected with virus, because their users wanted love. We find such odd proxies for ourselves, we are able to anthropomorphize at distance. Find identification with Wall-E robots rather than corpulent humans. The stupid magic of little underdog computer as effigies, set to slow burn.

Sarah Rapson at Modern Art

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As our arts fight against the endless behind-glassing of virtualization, the distressed look of materiality is in right now. But these seem less about flaunting swatches of a quickly etherealizing world than about an insistence on the material substrates of our thought. A reminder that these are the moldy objects we build our empire on. 2,000 years of grandiose diction projected on slowly eroding blankets. We proclaim "painting now and forever." In reality it will last as long as it's cared for. Not so much painting/materiality as the loss of. Be careful.

see too: Lutz Bacher at Galerie Buchholz and Sarah Rapson at Essex Street

Group Show at The Downer

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It's courageous, setting your art against the outside, to compete with the real. This is space of painting's "pure idiocy." Its hard headed survival. Or the PR more descriptively, "On the whole, [painting] is fully unbothered by its detractors and lumbers on, buttressed by history and money. Like Don Draper telling some irate underling that’s trying to shame him, “I don’t think about you at all.”" Painting is "this invincible thing that is constantly at war with itself is exhilarating." A stupid animal surviving in spite of itself, protected by some aura, which we all love to argue endlessly what. Art, as our collective cloud based MMORPG. As long as there's players, the game continues. 

David Korty at Derek Eller Gallery

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Laying somewhere in a lineage between Carrol Dunham, David Reed, Math Bass, painting becomes cipher, a code for it, turned into its puzzle pieces. PR: figures "haunting me from logos and bygone cartoons, advertisements meant to sell desires more than childhood entertainments." The wacky fun of painting converted to information, iconographies of, which connote but don't mean. We feel like we could make sense of these, connecting the dots between its puzzled parts. But we won't, they are their scrambled non-sequitur. What is important to note is that painting converted to symbols for it.