Past: Mathis Altmann at Halle für Kunst Lüneburg, Mathis Altmann at Freedman Fitzpatrick

"The Model becomes predominate as the world's point of scale becomes unmoored, and reality floating between the virtual and material conditions - abstracted by floating points of enumeration etc. etc. Housing replaces houses replaces house, distinct from home, which is bombed out. The model encapsulates this world governed by virtual features, the planning, projected statistical everything, abstraction of everyday. Looking down at our hands the sphere of the earth is said to be at our fingertips. This abstraction feels lived in."

See too: Mathis Altmann at Halle für Kunst Lüneburg, Mathis Altmann at Freedman Fitzpatrick

Alfred D'ursel at dépendance & Monika Stricker at Galerie Clages

(dépendance, Clages)

Hot monkey action day today at CAD. A sort of content of the night. With monkeys. But whereas one withdraws into dark heat the other goes full frontal - bearing all the fruits it can let hang out. A press release well to go with it:

"The depiction of a monkey actually always stands for something else, especially in paintings. Most of the time, monkeys act as a distorted picture of mankind, they articulate the tragic dimension of human existence, of life as a cultivated animal. Clearly, Rococo singerie painting only worked satirically ... Monika Stricker continues her engagement with the scrotum, which has now been going on for several years."

Exposing the nut of the matter doesn't diminish it. Turning on the lights doesn't necessarily let its content out. 

see too: Monika Stricker at dépendance

Past: Monika Stricker

"... these paintings are soft creatures -  Stricker can turn a nutsack into a malignant growth. This would seem obvious or easy - the thing is an alien enough gum - ... there's an uncomfortable paternity. Occasionally even looks like a crowning child, the penis removed entirely, and the bulb swells. A monstrous sex, and painting a strange care for the creature. ..."

Full: Monika Stricker at dépendance

Masaya Chiba at Bel Ami

(link)

Display being a function of reproduction, education. Masaya Chiba's always something pedagogically askew - like there's a presentation happening, there's some thing scientifically flat about the work - illustrative - but without information's answer. They seem to imply some big red arrow that would point out meaning, but lacking it instead presents that interminable inkblot question, 

see too: Masaya Chiba at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery

Past: Moyra Davey

"Sontag pointed out photography as inherently elegiac, and Davey further expresses its moribund nature-morte with a gloss of preemptive nostalgia. Like instagram filters made to affect 70’s grain on crystalline microlenses - an artificial warmth on the cold of its technologic clarity - Davey pre-placing that touch on the photographs..."

"art often feels like a process, technology, for imprinting nostalgia. ...  Photography provides /immediate packaging: that inherently elegiac medium also promises preservation of someone's sight of you.' So you get to preserve your recognition like pickled pigs and call it romantic. Nostalgia's artistry becomes its own technology. "

"It's alluring to attach the psychology of money to feces."

Full: Moyra Davey at Institute of Contemporary Art, Moyra Davey at Portikus, Moyra Davey, Peter Hujar at Galerie Buchholz

K.R.M. Mooney at Miguel Abreu

(link)

The problems of material convergence remain testament that the world is not entirely plasticked. That you can't just glue anything to anything. A reminder that while we can impregnate kittens with panda, injection mold ears on mice, we still have screws holding a world together. Bones stitched with bolts. Medical grade screws. The world is dumb and full of pipes rusting. There may never be a technology to solve this.  We may never invent a better substance than this. 

Alex Mackin Dolan at David Lewis

(link)

CAWD has been talking about the interfacization of painting since at least 2016. 

the iconization of content. The practice of stylization...  Information is converted to its image then compositionalized. But that doesn't nerf it. The interface is strong, it causes our reading which we cannot prevent. Icons are meaning even when they don't. and we are like hypnotized. We are made to read space, and here sign systems converted to labyrinth make puzzling. [The fount of art]

Alex Mackin Dolan's had been a sort of Bickerton excess of this until now literalizing it. We put quarters of our attention into painting- this is a wishing well for meaning. Here the pay off is content, and that bright shiny orb of an interior payoff. This is how painting is like gambling. 

see too: Interface

David Douard at Serralves

(link)

The trash pile of culture looks different every 20 years. Certain shapes just didn't exist 30 yers ago. Metal logos metastasized and "Every 10 years the art's assemblage reinvents itself as the dumpsters picked through are modernized to the current castoffs and appear new, the waste that evolves along culture until finally an artist is able to rummage up enough LEDs, acrylic panels and Arte Povera catalogs to accumulate the update to our Rauschenberg cardboard clogging the pipes of our forward progress. At least sticks are still in vogue as symbols of the foraging, our original human toil, production."

This "looks like you blew up a shopping mall, like its reassembly after catastrophe, like hangers categorizing airline wreckage. Trying to make sense in debris. Us, a cargo cult. Us, a primitive culture, [these are the] aurochs on our white cave walls. With the debris of culture. Our Mystic auto-anthropology."

"art treats culture as a system of artifacts to be interrogated by its own white light certification process, a factory for meaning production." 

Art becomes cultural waste, the gallery swallows, and you the viewer digest its tract. and "We eat its excitement."

Eventually the malls will look again like this, maybe they already do. 

Past: David Douard at Johan Berggren

"...the bodily in the trash accumulated, acknowledging the filth of things ready made, the body in the product, in the package, in the excrement of practice, Duoard both reacting to and participating in the cold industry of the system; filthy, disgusting, sporadically humane."


Full:  David Douard at Johan Berggren

 Past: Kyung-Me

...You look into Kyung-Me's, awaiting you is a little snow globe of a world inside it...

Full: Kyung-Me at Bureau & Silke Otto-Knapp at The Renaissance Society

Claire Fontaine at Air de Paris

(link)

The art equivalent of a Live Laugh Love poster. When you point this out they say yes that's the point. But it's a shitty point. Do collectors know they're buying fake art? Or does it not matter anymore. Shitty art self-naturalizes on the walls long enough. The artist is on strike, that's why the art is bad, it would be neoliberal to care. 

Past:  Claire Fontaine

"People hate Fontaine. It's easy to see why, and a particularly searing example by Chris Wiley for Frieze (e.g. 'I also consider the mealy-mouthed, jargon-besotted forms of this political position’s promulgation – utilized by the editors of Tiqqun, Fontaine and others – an impediment to reasoned debates surrounding political change, as well as a crime against language' a single sentence in an unending screed against the work) is the front and first review of one of Fontaine's gallery's press packet on the artists. "

"exemplar of the artist's grandstanding the impotent and hollow feeling of political ineffectuality as big shiny horrors,"

Read Full: Claire Fontaine at Galerie Neu, Claire Fontaine at Galerie Neu (2)

Past: Dozie Kanu

"And one of the joys of a vernacular functionalism is the endlessly alternative, the elsewise arrival at a similar solution. ... Kanu's project might be a similar mining of alternatives to an already existing solution, selling the artworld what it wants. "

"Art has no surprise, all subversion is already accepted. But furniture is a form with expectations and so allows for subversion. ...wonky, impractical, painful, these are the tools of the artist/designer. There's an air of relational aesthetics: art's questions are traded for a function. Who needs beauty when you're being served excellent chili. Art's unicorn "criticality" gets replaced with being useful. ... A 100 years of critics inventing function for art, as MEANING, eventually confuses the issue. The old Indiana Jones slight of hand, exchanging heavy trash for gold. But Indy made that academic gaff, mistaking volume for weight, having never really held gold, didn't know the exchange rate. Then the temple collapses. 

"The dust forms a question for archeologists. And then how you felt about the temple to begin with."

Full: Dozie Kanu at Project Native Informant, Dozie Kanu at Performance Space

Past: Josephine Pryde

"... Pryde uses Pop's function, the saccharine of instant recognition ... whose comfort allow defenses dropped and desire for disposable sweets, a populist bent to criticality ... a shutterstock imaging of normalized categories.... "

"Genre is the capsule that allows immediate swallowing... And so we understand them like a trojan horse, internalize with ease. Ostensibly later spring forths the latent soldiers, medicine. But it might be the gulping was the trick. Getting you to immediately get them. The cuteness of gerbils, the joke of consumption."

Read full: Josephine Pryde at Arnolfini, Josephine Pryde at Galerie Neu

Harald Thys at MANIERA

(link)

A stupid idea given full weight. Makes for interest. Because it nerfs the blowhard heights of design to this crayola sketch. Rendered in 3D. With an accredited automotive designer attached. Maybe it's the simple pleasure of watching design "fail" but function. The great outrage of twit overlord's low polygon cybertrucks winning design of the year. There's something about "bad" industrial design. The enjoyment of something less capitalistically aerodynamic, not very aerodynamic at all. Why do most cars look like lobsters from future? And not this soft bar of soap.

See too: Andreas Schulze at Sprüth Magers

Nancy Lupo & Monique Mouton at Veda

(link)

Both whose object's loss are one breath away. At the cusp of entropic dissolve. Lupo's stuf and Mouton's airs. Waste, exhalation, as much accumulated or captured as made. They even kind of look like "strange attractors." Or "Cantor dust" - just remove the center square - extract her mouth, it will still stand in for her - the ever fractilization of things into the dust they shall return.

Past: Monique Mouton

"[Fragments] are wounded, ominous, their meaning is fractured, in ways that can't be put back together. We place these objects to our foreheads and ask for their secrets, contemplate their use, rotate them in our minds. [Their use is] to be pressed to ears, interminably silent, and hear the ocean in your head." Attempts to cage a cloud, the pleasured exhalation of your last cigarette, leave one wondering at the limits of repair.

Full: Monique Mouton at Bridget Donahue

Past: Chadwick Rantanen

"it's tearing off the wings a butterfly, removing the potential of resurrection/metamorphosis - returning the butterfly to its immanent flightless body, a grub, snivelling across surface."

 

"...intentionally crafting kawaii critters to abuse in the circuits of his machinery. The gestures seem less absurd than frustrated .. The director of fetish "crush" films Jeff Valencia speaks of desiring to be the subject under the feet of the crusher, identifying with the object/animal being crushed."

"And which, these are torturous objects. ...and this is upcycling from hell. This is trash into an agnostic crucifix, into a "devotional object," something the PR hints we may supplicate to... that's just appending symbology to make your fetish seem rational. Rantanen just seems to love torturing the stuf of capital. Pretend to asphyxiate it."

Click for full: Chadwick Rantanen at Essex Street, “May the Bridges I Burn Light the Way” at STANDARD (OSLO), Chadwick Rantanen at Team (bungalow), Chadwick Rantanen at Bel Ami

Danielle Mckinney at Marianne Boesky Gallery

(link)

Thinking about past paintings, about Eric Fischl's bad boy, how bad it was, how that was what we wanted then. How that's not what we want now. It was bad then. How what we want now is memories of how painting-as-a-stand-in-for-history could have been, like the colors were this way all along, a rose tinted rearranging of our hindsight, now in 2020. A golden hour for in your dreams.

 Past: Gillian Carnegie at dépendance

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. ... something mercurial, resistant to hands, and thus why all the writing on Carnegie is pretty much awful, this. ... 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.

Full: Gillian Carnegie at dépendance

Peter Bradley at KARMA

(link)

Painting like a trap for accumulating ... what? Not content precisely but something we might confuse with it. Painting like a trap fo accumulating our heads. A retainer for mental projection, light.

Group Show at Antenna Space

(link)

Thing becomes stuf. Stuf become our thing, a movement, today in art the object is animate with Kristeva flesh, a new form of object that is no longer what you see because what you see is sexually confusing. Why does a couch look like a tanned corpse, why does our/ painting look like a redundant skin. The moment is marked! Question for grad students: Why are we attracted to this? 

See too: Anti-ligature rooms, OUT NOW!

Past: Fergus Fehilly

"Against everyone else's returns to modernism Feehily's could seem one more scuzz on the pond [...] Instead, perhaps like Raoul De Keyser, a mining for some odd uncanny version. [...] their off-elegance. Paintings like the underdog, we root for them. Like wearing [Modernism's] fur-coat with a runny-nose.

"in the end Feehily's seemingly less industrial more underdog engine may be no differently dead. "


Read full: Fergus Feehily at Misako & Rosen, Fergus Feehily & Günther Förg at June

Cristina de Miguel at L21 Gallery

(link)

Binge and purge the cultural cake,  painting like "a dog having found the birthday cake to lay it out once again on the patterned rug." A painting barfs. No one ever needed to excuse painting excess. It's what we want. More. To get it and eat it too. But the consumption of painting is in reverse.

See too: Genieve Figgis at Almine Rech, Joanne Greenbaum at Crone, Joanne Greenbaum at Richard Telles

Past: Mathis Gasser

"Like taking sips from a firehose, Gasser's sampling of the deluge of images...using the fountain to make a construct-your-own-adventures storyboard.."

"The big dumb object is painting."

Mathis Gasser at Centre d’édition contemporaine, Mathis Gasser at Ginerva Gambino

Corinne Wasmuht at Petzel

(link)

“in the era of the LED-backlit computer and smartphone [that] often engage with the kind of spaces and effects that the electronic screen generates.” Alas, as the same catalog admits, “what can be achieved today through painting looks very circumscribed compared to what is possible in other more immersive and interactive media.”

Like Julie Mehretu, Guillermo Kuitca, every tornado-hits-architecture painter, the question of "image processing" has been replaced by ever faster forms. Visual interest is now just a technological slider. "Vibrance" "Contrast" "Interest" "New Paintings"

Past: Shimabuku at Nouveau Musée National de Monaco 

"It's that Bas Jan Ader, Francis Alys sort of breezing conceptual art. Gentle myth making.  You glean as much, more, from the generous press text ... as the images, which in true poetical-conceptual fashion, don't mean much, but instead provides a lovely illustration. It's easier to recall a myth if you have an image of it. Recall a time when we had time for this."

Past: Shimabuku at Nouveau Musée National de Monaco