Ibon Aranberri at fluent & Joseph Kusendila at Essex Street

(fluent, Essex)

A visual homology, empty displays, technical drawings, broken wood. Bones we could contrast and compare through ancestry. Or look to the future, the takeaway is, against the visual overload, there is a turn to an emptiness we find appealing, and competing visual cultures move toward symbiosis. Visual art an extension of sexual selection, plumage, or the ability to lay waste to, handicap theory. "honest signals" "authentic art". Move from a sociologic read of art to a biological one, a funnily fertile metaphors. 

Raqs Media Collective at Kunstverein Braunschweig

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Art that always sorta looks like a brand launch. An IPO party. You're not quite sure that the media company does, but the brand is built, swirled, holds feelings. The aimless affect spins. Maybe all art is a brand launch for what promise might harbor. Profits don't matter, what matters today is the excitement it can be made something great tomorrow. Buzz.

Past: Bri Williams

"if I covered you in lye, your body would turn to soap, a simple process of an alkaline solution mixing with fatty tissues. Your body itself is barely not-soap, and soap opens your body to becoming not body, cleanses you by blurring self with soap, which goes down the drain..."

Read full: Bri Williams at Interface, Bri Williams at Queer Thoughts

Jordan Casteel at MASSIMODECARLO

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Totally fine paintings, everything plain, explicitly about what they're about, a direct representation. They're a product for which most museums, fashion mags, genius lists, are in dire need. And the press releases actually temper the gold that they have. A pearl too large for anything good. Jealous neighbors whisper, trackers follow for market value, the little coyote dies in the tumult. The script written by a white man. The gem comes with peanut gallery critique, that this is its "moment," that eventually fashion passes, and everyone holding bag of passé pearls. (As if the last twelve "intellectual" movements haven't been.) But by this time they will be in the halls, spaces previously occupied by shadows, tidal floods reroute the river, and we learn to respect collected water. 

Reynaldo Rivera at Reena Spaulings Fine Art

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Documentation awaiting its documentary. Its context, life, backfilled into it. You feel it when the reviewer recommends the catalog. The loss. The ruins of a once beautiful citizenry. We now vampire. Not only its pain, but its life too, brought to cold hands of art's Wunderkammer. "Dominant culture lays the concrete of its social conditions, proclaims 'look a dandelion has grown,' hangs its photo in our halls as testament to humanity. But it can seem like a testament to the concrete." I'm not sure who is at fault here, no one really, I guess life should be bottled, the only way to continue ours. 

See too: Alvin Baltrop at Hannah Hoffman, Peter Hujar at Maureen Paley

 Past: Sophie Reinhold at Sundogs

"Unsure how fun it is to watch someone melt into a bubble bath."

Full: Sophie Reinhold at Sundogs

Naoki Sutter-Shudo at Crèvecoeur

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The trinket functions like a flower, a desirous other, holding some promise. We don't know what it is for, but it feels for something. The flower was beautiful before we knew its sexual radish. A promise on its lips. "the fantasy of [function], 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." An object that gestures its need, its promise for, with wet eyes blinking.

See too: Matt Paweski at Park View/Paul Soto, Naoki Sutter-Shudo at Bodega (1), Naoki Sutter-Shudo at Bodega (2)

Takako Yamaguchi at Ramiken Crucible

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Setting aside the Domenico Gnoli question for the present, there is something continuously robust in the breast of your facade. Blank and interpretable. Art fount. We turn identity into inkblot. 

Issy Wood at Carlos/Ishikawa

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Lost in the glass of virtualization, surface itself become artifact. Becomes the valuable relic. Do you get it? Touch is lost, becomes pornography, feeling through image. It makes sense, Wood, a cataloger of surface matte, already a year ago described with phrases like, "rising" "growing rapidly" "up-and-coming talent" while these thing plummet - we want what is lost, or more importantly, about to be. Nostalgia for the current. 

Also lol at the model standing 6 inches from the wall.

See too: Matte Representation

Dawn Williams Boyd at Dodd Galleries at the University of Georgia

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Explicitly religious, overtly narrative, even the lighting/photography doesn't have the contemporary virtuality. And this little fear that these, unfit, are scrolled through as "inclusion" - as the logic that explains it. The indiscriminate napalm of explanation. This while every NYC gallery attempts to revise its roster with 20 somethings that "fit the program." Which is the paradox of visibility. The things that don't fit the program, don't fit the program. Because the program of scatalogic seminal male nappies is prestigious. Instead a great pair of tits called Nurture.

Robert Kulisek at VI, VII

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In the sky, written overhead by plane, "Leave the youth alone. Stop extracting their joy to be sold like a vampire pleasure for vaults. Youth is not some fount to be bottled. Youth is not wasted on the young, attempts to preserve it the cold hands of those knowing is. A canned and brined youth. Advertorial youth. Youth to sell perfume. Youth to be enjoyed as youth is not youth. Put your plastic bottling devices down. There is no fount here, only cold hands."

John Giorno at Almine Rech

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Words given oomph, pain, the racket of advertising on poem phrases, hijacking your attention less as an ad than a koan-like image, "chrysanthemum and skulls," in graphic megaphone. "Lots of artists like to put phrases on signs, do it in a similar way. A particularly satisfying gesture: language, propelled with advertorial oomph, instead deadpans with its empty cymbal crash; understand the words but, devoid of context feel a little haunted, disembodied, ghosts of something far."  The generalized airiness of poety instead at 11. Shouting a phrase that echoes empty in your head. It's nicer to have strange image ringing in your ears than some ad slogan selling weiners in a jingle. Less the ideology of LIVE LAUGH LOVE and more the crush of screaming listless image.

see too: Matt Keegan, Kay Rosen at Grazer Kunstverein, Hanne Lippard & Nora Turato at Metro Pictures, Gene Beery at Shoot the Lobster, Karl Holmqvist at Sant’Andrea de Scaphis,

Raimer Jochims at Jacky Strenz

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Like rock tumbler jeweling its stones, Jochims smoothes his. A simple process, wiping away the rough, a polish, revealing pools. Dumb rocks become gems. Why we like polished rocks, that is a good question.

See too: Raimer Jochims at Jacky Strenz (1), Raimer Jochims at Jacky Strenz (2), Raimer Jochims at Jacky Strenz (3) 

Billboards at Joy Seine-Saint-Denis

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The art billboard ostensibly reclaims space from the commercial commandeering of your senses, to return to some more mythically "creative" or "beautiful" use. This is the classic "poetic fissuring" of art. And Gonzalez-Torres's billboards were pinnacle art billboards, performing the usual art thing of reneging on the advertorial demand to shout something, and instead using the usual artistic silence as its loss, an empty bed, a space for your own private thoughts, the missing partner, communication, just you to project you own on white sheets. 

 Past: Gina Beavers

"Appending painting the body it both does and does not want. Inflating it to bulbousness, we want body but we want it sleek and slim for transaction, shipping, but here we find painting's brushwork metastasized and images become their nightmare: embodied. "How to achieve a flawless look with NO CAKE FACE."

Read all: Gina Beavers

Hanna Hur at Kristina Kite Gallery

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Perception is individual, it is not art's usual shared image/object. Instead almost non-transactable. Possibly what Majoli means when saying "If our survival is tied to the capacity to perceive stability, vulnerability is made apparent at the root of--caused by our sense of sight." Because the optical instead flights. The realm of the biological, the immanent instead of the transcendent. Eye test patterns instead of television. 

See too: Hanna Hur at Feuilleton

 Past: Hanna Hur at Feuilleton

"Op-art was a cheap imitation of the purer form's sanctity; Op-art rested on physiologic parlor tricks rather than the more strict and thus universal forms of abstraction that could [ostensibly] communicate with dolphins and gods."

 full: Hanna Hur at Feuilleton

Past: Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda

"In the smoke of Matias Faldbakken's rocketship ascendancy the artworld was left blind scrambling to adhere a politic for it, to make a critical foundation for the artworld's hot new power iconography, unable to accept that how it looked, rather than any little content it contained, was its appeal. ... Issues of interest for Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda, ..."

"Artists continually forcing a reading between the lines they force distinctly apart. So that the blank white space feels ominous and full, like a detective novel... Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda adept at objects in aura of evidence or clues..."

"Making interpretation a matter of delicacy."

"It is like a cliche in reverse, watch it be structured, maintained."

Full: Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda at Essex Street

Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda at House of Gaga

Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda at Francesca Pia
Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda at 356 Mission

Greg Parma Smith at Galerie Francesca Pia

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Faceting jewels of symbols in cultural stone, painting, to attribute the glyphs a more meaningful nonsense. This is what painting is, a burning of effort, an expenditure of culture, to ordain the halo on cherubic vessels, whatever vogue angel. The potato chip company values their crisp by turning the packaging auburn, the natural halo, this is moral. The painter asks for investment in his through something else, but it is also moral. The cultural search for taste, gems in the temple. 

Past: Shannon Cartier Lucy at Hussenot 

"... painting's prize is "what it is about." ... there is something to be unlocked, understood. There is something to be won. This is the belief. ... Painting begins to be prized not for painting but for this mystery. And a mystery cannot tell you its answer. A mystery instead must load its objects with intent, clues, an ambrosia of noir, an affect of meaning. Thus the puzzification of painting...."

Full: Shannon Cartier Lucy at Hussenot 

Brook Hsu at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler

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"Monochromes denied the pleasure of painting," someone once said to me. And Hsu's are like looking at a museum through Heineken bottles to deny the pleasure of the world. Turns out the world is still pretty good. And this chromatic loss only instead heightens desire, want for the full spectral ecstasy, denied in your beer-glassed body. Maybe this is what Homer meant by a wine dark sea, looking out its liquor bottle like a telescope, at a world in viridian. Drunk captains of the museum. But, this continually applied loss could be metaphorically over attended, it is too meaningful, and wants for. Its erotic denial is itself a thing, no metaphor please. 

Ei Arakawa at Artists Space

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Was Arakawa's always just a relational aesthetics program upgraded for networks? A restaurant of friends, a social gathering as exhibitionary lighthouse beacon? The Radiants. Less exhibitions than event organizing. You make it up on the spot. This begets The Fear: a "low-grade Stockholm syndrome that many people engaged in participatory art suffer, the primary symptom being their inability to accept that something quite underwhelming could result from so much time and energy spent in captive social engagement." ... "to begin to understand how art institutions might be attracted to participatory art as an instinctive form of biological survival."

Because: the system shifts from content generation to interactivity itself, turning itself into interface for the user/viewer to self-produce. This is the turnkey-operation entrepreneurial dream, in which as long as the structure is up and running "content-revenue" will self-generate, perfect museum lobby bait. It fulfills the institutional functions in their programs whose goals like "outreach" have kids painting in the style of those artist to see themselves as, and mimicking the corporate strategies [speaker invites] as a manic oversized art-as-cartoon-absurdity version constructing a real crowdpleaser if there ever was one.

Elliott Jamal Robbins at Park View/Paul Soto

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The commitment to drawing, rather the juiced paintings they could be monied as, seems important. "A difference between cartoons/comics and paintings is that comics ask you to understand them but paintings ask you to identify them." A drawing seems intended that you understand it. And so when the murky demands of painting enter them, there becomes a confusion of subject. Hazing aesthetic demands. The artist waits to pull the light-cord of an idea, the phallic gun of abstraction's seminal order, onto a conveyer belt of canvas, gets his identity in order, Tap, Click, POW, Splash, Whoosh, Whir, and Tssk, a production is all too mechanic, paint a depressing fog, maybe a spray of brains. 

See too: Elliott Jamal Robbins at Kai Matsumiya