Past: Elliott Jamal Robbins

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 all too mechanic, paint a depressing fog, maybe a spray of brains. 

Full: Elliott Jamal Robbins at Kai Matsumiya, Elliott Jamal Robbins at Park View/Paul Soto

Aria Dean at Greene Naftali

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The disquiet is a lack, everything here is removal. The crash crash minimalism is instead a computer rendering - the handsy violence of Chamberlin reproduced in silicon gum, printed. Blank assets of a Looney Tunes world. What if we removed all this, life? A gray goo situation, the jouissant world replaced with... the basest simplest desire of self reproduction. The gray goo scenario is a metaphor for art, for everything, what if our propagation is what it's all about? Highest achievement, another art exhibition. The artist gets out the goo. 

Dean making work without any of the generalized signifiers of Black art, while avowing her "ongoing pursuit of art that models the structure of Blackness." Dean's is a work that is scrubbed. This scrubbing would be a fertile ground for critical hooha, but mostly it is an affective one, in the sense that it's almost affectless, chilly. Slaughterhouse modernism, art galleries, the anti-ligature rooms of our age. "A room full of paintings that won't let you kill yourself."

See too: Aria Dean at The Renaissance Society, Melvin Edwards at Daniel Buchholz

Past: Birke Gorm

Our rising desire for materiality in a world losing it manifests in fetish for increasingly grotesque versions... fecal smearing serve many real purposes that are often overlooked by caregivers and medical providers: ...

Materialize has become  a new process akin to electroplating, anodizing, or gilding. Artists "materialize" things like text into substance, into a material with weight, turd like figures, objects which feel material. ... materialization is the patina of objectification, an excess...

Birke Gorm at Croy Nielsen, Birke Gorm at Croy Nielsen(2)

Tomma Abts at Galerie Buchholz

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Stubborn becomes a horn filling the air, an ongoing announcement: "having or showing dogged determination not to change one's attitude or position on something." Stubborn. Repetition is part of the point, rubbing past painting into these "new" ones. The "abstract Morandi" - the permutations of a few simple vessels - flitting between abstraction and concrete shadows. Unsure whether these pull off the same miracle. 

Past: Tomma Abts

That despite Zwirner’s PR qualifying Abts as “continuously explor[ing] the activity of painting" (and not simply “painting” like a Neanderthal) Abts is a painter, and, since we’ve long forgotten how to speak about “dumb” painting, everyone instead argues why these aren’t, and instead speak of an “emotional rationality” and “anything but expressionist,” spreading pesticides against the fear of the subject reappearing like selves in the mirror.

The pleasure of Abts’s paintings is that of origami, or well constructed puzzle, like setting a good corner in New Mexico pasture, solving simply its own internal puzzling, like shaker furniture, a clever construction in a protestant like satisfaction of a few-frills job completed.

a triumph of deafness, buckling-down to the same task endlessly, slowly, stubbornly insisting on the cobwebbed autonomy of painting long ago cut and bled out.

Read full: Tomma Abts at David Zwirner, Tomma Abts at greengrassi, Tomma Abts at The Art Institute of Chicago

Benjamin Echeverria at Francis Irv

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Patina authenticates, proves labor, human, the subject goo we desire from painting. Painting is an adhesive that collects the air of its subject the artist. More than brushwork. It's how Guyton manufactured his celebration: all the little blips and drips and skips he was commended for tugging out - pressing print on the markers of work, authenticity! This was during the vogue of reclaimed wood cladding a world turning plastic.  The myth of artistic journey, as a symbol for it. "If I give you my denim. Will you simulate distress"?

See too: Alvin Baltrop at Hannah Hoffman, Frank Walter at David Zwirner, Purvis Young at James Fuentes

Past: Benjamin Echeverria at Parapet Real Humans

"You apply a video filter, you belabor the painting. Both become search for means to make 'residue' appear, of time, of warmth we're after. A weathering effect you can turn on and off like rain."

Full: Benjamin Echeverria at Parapet Real Humans

Alexandra Bircken at BQ, Berlin

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Things are not what they seem. It's an old trope. Ostensibly the intelligent few perceives what has been carefully hidden. But things look like other things and you put a whole room of these together and the whole world starts to feel like a hallucination, like a theater. Suspicion for innuendo, for meaning, taints the air. Suspends recognition. We become the paranoid in the funhouse of the world. An art premised on this.

 Past: Alexandra Bircken

...apparition in objects float like innuendos among polite society, tenuous, unmentionable, which Bircken's place the words on our tongue: the body, the butthole, the flesh, the donger like thing you handle every day.

Full: Alexandra Bircken at Le Crédac & BQ

Past: Amelie von Wulffen

"...the history of painting comes like bruises into von Wulffen's paintings. How images batter through time. We have memory of how painting was, how impressionism was painted, but it's wrong, like your head full of hangover, a painting full of malfunction, its shipment through time arrives damaged."

"...its history of abuses...  Painting is filled with horror, the calls coming from inside the house."

click: New trend: forgetful surrealism, Amelie von Wulffen at KW, Amelie von Wulffen at Reena Spaulings, Amelie von Wulffen at Barbara Weiss, Amelie von Wulffen at Freedman Fitzpatrick, Amelie Von Wulffen at Gio Marconi

Michaela Eichwald at Marian Goodman

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But Eichwald finds the edge, the moment before a Frankenthaler turns into a dog's sick. 

The neanderthal nappie merchants - Joe Bradley, Josh Smith, et al - attempted proving beyond doubt: paint just always looks good. But Eichwald makes one really sit in its question. 

Past: Michaela Eichwald

...poured onto pleather paint flourishes implication: painters are smearing their own oily expelleds. ... Like graffiti's intestinal signatures defecating their authorial. ... you're still reminded of your bowel held waste, the brown rope tethering us to earth that Eichwald seems to consistently paint.

Eichwald threatens actual excess, dribbles that could still stain, or, like graffiti, are already stained, vandalized. Which Eichwald's do feel, vandalized - like a school desk's attempted Baphomet that comes out more as a hairy devil with tits...

Because the acne poxed kid's hard desire for satanism outshines his ability to actually conjure it. This is endearing. And there's a joke in here about teenage bedsheets too, but both failed satan and besotted sheets are of that teenage libidinal excess that has a tendency to spill, run over, an excess energies that stain things...

Giving new meaning to art that matched the couch. Painting like a potato, couch like an Erwin Wurm. They meet in handshake of our body - they both hold meat and brain, contemplation and weight. Becoming here an ouroboros, contemplating our own tail, head feast ass.

Eichwald's ability to make true atrociousness platable...

Click for full: Michaela Eichwald at Silberkuppe, Michaela Eichwald at Maureen Paley, Michaela Eichwald at dépendance, Michaela Eichwald at Kunsthalle Basel, Michaela Eichwald at Reena Spaulings Fine Art

Tishan Hsu at Empty Gallery

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Videodrome's image of the man sinking into a television screen, along with its tagline "Long live the new flesh," were two perfect nuggets all but eclipsing the film itself - which I can barely remember. But recall the movie magic: image, pure ethereal surface, desire, that could was given reality, body, skin. The practical SFX perfected the transubstantiation. It tapped some unconscious cultural anxiety to give body to what was only presented to us abstractly, remotely, a televisual war that didn't actually take place. It's an old horror story- our dreams, manifested, bring actual nightmares. This is what we deep down know, why it's such successful plot trope, our desires are craven, you manifest the flesh on the screen and in reality you receive a really annoying supermodel. 

Vittorio Brodmann at PAGE (NYC)

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The teenage sock, the teenage notebook - sites of primordial soup of painting congealing life, sentience, evolution doesn't always lead to advancement, occasionally a butthole develops on a forehead, leaves a whole family tree in ruin - these are the expenses of transformation, a horribly burned beast, a whole society left with questions of euthanizing the entire series, of paintings, but we don't do that anymore, we let them live, you never know when the butthead will teach you something.

Hiroshi Sugito at Lulu

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Coy? Being this cute? This formally shameless. Hidden amongst the shambles a resolute belief in the highest laws of royal painting. Without quite being it. Oh you just want to rage against objects so [x].  A king wearing a pauper's uniform, an anarchist's A, you're no hermit, you're a monarchist, to the throne of painting, a prince! 

Past: Vittorio Brodmann

"By turning the painting into an accumulation of 'Brodmann moments' (in a cave-painting/graffito mode) Brodmann compositionalizes his semio-capital, transmuting it into information, into a field of redirects failing to place it anywhere, turning it into painting as a recursive field, allowing to renege on the artist task of 'be Brodmann' while being Brodmann."

"for Brodmann style is suspended in the dispersed particles of its past participants, in the soup of its references, closing in on the liquify setting of its blender. Brodmann’s an 'artist to watch' dissolve the darker edges of his earlier characters into its broth of tasteful painting"

Click: Vittorio Brodmann at Halle Für Kunst Lüneburg, Vittorio Brodmann at Freedman Fitzpatrick, Vittorio Brodmann at Gregor Staiger

 Past: Katherine Bradford

"And paint is substance these things wear. It's why painters love pools, water, excuse to cover their subjects in what we came to be deluged with: nostalgia for painting.

Full: Katherine Bradford at Adams and Ollman

Jessica Jackson Hutchins at Soccer Club Club

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The ubiquity of "goopy ceramics" itself became the problem. Spent of our gooey dopamine reward, we come to believe our boredom as judgment, which replaces criticism, authorizes moving to the next shiny thing.

Sanya Kantarovsky at Taka Ishii Gallery

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There is occasional painterly comedy - the necronomic fingers of Schiele's corpse hands grasping the blemishless lithe expanse of a Frankenthaler's body. Or, the melting visage of some cortical homunculus, melting into a warm goo, not what the critics call drawing but a pleasure centering painting... The cartoon is often muddled by the wanton perfume of the paint. The long sinuous line stretching Kantarovsky's whole career has been made much of, typographic elegance, his cartoonists wit - though wish we could just have the drawings to prove it, since this seems a reviewer's fundamental misunderstanding of what is so enviable about cartoons, their lack of painterlyness - but Kantarovsky has always convoluted painting and drawing, the sleight of hand: having one, a fondling grope of the other. 

Past: Solange Pessoa

"... we find some comfort in dirt not because of its primeval 'truth' but because it seems like it can't obsolesce, it can't be superseded, blown away as dust, which we mistake for being eternal."

"stonehengification...The cruder it is, the more archaic it looks, the more permanent we perceive it. Interminably stupid rocks last an unfortunate forever. So paintings like pictograms, petroglyphs. Give a rock some eyes."

Full: Solange Pessoa at Mendes Wood DM, Stonehengification

You may have noticed from time to time that we post messages just like this one lamenting things like art schools, art fairs, or other services that might be relevant to people interested in contemporary art. These are called weeping and we have space available to reach Contemporary Art Writing Daily’s audience this fall. Email contact@artwritingdaily.com for more details.

Past: Gerrit Frohne-Brinkmann

"an iphone is not magic but a rock certainly is."

Gerrit Frohne-Brinkmann at Noah Klink, Gerrit Frohne-Brinkmann at Noah Klink(2)

Past: Sanya Kantarovsky

"painting today is prerequistely stylized with the past worn as its own sleeve. There is not a painting today not “stylized” with its own past instance, that doesn’t dress itself in it. Kantarovsky doesn’t treat style as symbolic fashion to be worn, but merely the water one swims in today, the status quo for an art submerged in the redirection of flows of “content.” That some could be mistaken for a Kai Althoff matters less than none, the difference is ideological, one cold one warm."

Full thing: Sanya Kantarovsky at Marc Foxx, Sanya Kantarovsk & Camille Blatrix at Modern Art, Sanya Kantarovsky at Kunsthalle Basel

Past: K.r.m. Mooney

"the 'setting' of jewelry is key, the micro-fetish of attachmenting...  the problem of material convergence, of which Money is all about...."

"A pearl sets off the clavicle...."

"the copper bite plates allow you an orthodontics to wear the institutions like bling"

"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.."

Read full: K.r.m. Mooney at Pied-á-terre, K.r.m. Mooney at Altman Siegel, K.R.M. Mooney at Miguel Abreu

Morag Keil, Bedros Yeretzian at Commercial Street, Los Angeles

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Word clouds exploded as the vacuous form of auto-generated poetry that - as art - found meaning through artifactifying culture. Pulling objects from the wreckage to totemize - ascribe aura as font-size to. And generate an ostensible meta-layer of meaning. Doesn't this sound like art? Like art, it was stupid. Turning text into an inkblot to search for signs of what ended up being only your mother's indifference. Yourself in a warbled mirror. 

See too: Click Merlin Carpenter at Overduin & Co., Lutz Bacher at 3320 18th St

Past: Morag Keil

"Keil's knack for pinpointing and amplifying the dreck comprising our doldrums would seem cruel if masochism hadn't become so fun, as means of at least owning it: the if-I-am-going-to-feel-depression-I-may-as-well-inflict-it-upon-myself feeling of control. So if you're looking for a hit of coal black drudgery Keil is it. Almost baroquely morose."

"the new psychedelic experience .. updating conceptual art for a new generation of well-versed conceptually-high-tolerant semionauts, the new drug the complete meltdown of conceptual sense."


full: Morag Keil at Project Native Informant, Morag Keil at Jenny’s, Morag Keil at Real Fine Arts,

Past: Richard Hawkins

"collage becomes important as the collisions of the world's disparate systems become increasing violent, and the Surrealists and Frankfurters were wrong that irrational juxtaposition would spark any mass as the world became the biggest surrealist juxtaposition of all, and that collage in the larger sense - the sense that Hawkins has practiced since the beginning - was meant instead to make "alternative forms of touch" as soft touchdowns, as a sort of pathos? The decrepit sexual patina grown over Hawkins work wasn't always so. There were once clean young men paper-clipped to fields of bright fabric, and anyone was yet to be beheaded."

See too: Richard Hawkins at Jenny’s and Richard Telles

Frieda Toranzo Jaeger at Galerie Barbara Weiss

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Dressing up painting in bondage femme, kinda fun, like when my cousins dressed their younger brother up in a big pink dress to be paraded around the family gathering, photographed, and be mocked for years - there's something essentialist about the fun, a criticism leveled at Judy Chicago who also used the car as a phallus to be semantically tortured - there's fun in dress up, the critique will go on for decades, "Hey painting remember when we dressed you up as a girl?"

Seth Price at Petzel

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The real technology here is that Price found a way to avoid pinning his artist-butterfly subjectivity by letting some robots in. An android Price built to avoid fully naming, exposing, the artistic myth, Seth Price, fully. We trust gesture and painting as the concretized mind of the artist - and this techno means allowed Price what he's always been after, the squid's escape. Q, what we're left holding. A, disappearance duh. His long term subject and maybe Price's longterm point is proving that this is actually an axiom of art, left clutching ink resembling but not quite actualizing a human.

Past: Liam Gillick

"...The forebear to today's Simon Dennys and Anne Imhofs, the weaponizing of corporate and cultural tropes as a banality, ambivalent to its corporate manipulation of emotive capacities..."


Read full: Liam Gillick at CAC Vilnius

Past: Seth Price

"Has Price gone "painting"? In hindsight despite all the technologic and cultural baggage, Price's containers were always forcing that enigma of painting into the vessels everyone was only speaking of conceptually despite Price's continuous plastering optical illusions on." 

"Which here the point being any sufficiently advanced imaging technology might be indistinguishable from painting's magic. It will produces something alien, mysterious. Halter is right to bring up Gulliver's Travels in relation to Price, the book intended as a spoof of travelogue's desire for exoticism that also came at time when access to scientific technology like microscopes had become common, travel and tech magic depleted, something for parody. "

"We'd been keen to be left with a joke, but when this tech eventually obsolesces into banality, we should prepare for simply being left with abstractions, hands clutching inkblots."


Click: Seth Price at Friedrich Petzel,  Seth Price at 356 Mission, Seth Price at Stedelijk Museum, Seth Price at Museum Brandhorst

Past: Miho Dohi

"...something so fungal about them.."

"...Dohi's resemble, recall unplaceable things, which is our politics now. Resemblance was dirty back then, we wanted purity in forms, because clouded abstraction led to impure thoughts. Why do we desire allusive formalism now? Fecteau, Baghramian, Balema, Nagle, et al. Is still a latent surrealism? The shifting space of ambiguous "clouds" saying that one looks like a rabbit but never knowing it."

Miho Dohi at Hagiwara Projects, Miho Dohi at Crèvecœur

Past: Daniel Rios Rodriguez

"You can't paint a flower without ironizing its loveliness... Sentimentality drips into its performance ...and we blush for the artist having fallen into the trap of their own subjectivity for them. Thick paint helps. It  ... expresses materially the same excess as the subject is. Confidence in clumsiness, endlessly endearing..."

Read full: Daniel Rios Rodriguez at Lulu, Kate Newby, Daniel Rios Rodriguez at Nicelle Beauchene

Bill Hayden at Federico Vavassori

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Damn remember Real Fine Arts? The website is gone so you can't. Wish I could. What a run. Too bad. Our memory has gotten so short. Perhaps the memory that it happened is better than the warts of photography. Better to have the option to delete oneself. Because now the drawings just look unaccounted for, look really great.