view4 September 2025
Susan Rothenberg: The Weather at Hauser & Wirth New York. My first time encountering her work in the flesh—these are such slow release paintings. Was especially taken by Dos Equis (acrylic and tempera on canvas, 169.9 x 296.2 x 4.1 cm, 1974), a big white one of two horses overlapping, the whole composition sliced by lines intersecting twice near the canvas's horizontal midline, once near the top middle edge, and once near the bottom middle edge. The effect is kaleidoscopic, almost as if you are watching the forms alternate between embossing and debossing themselves, the mere presence of the intersecting lines recontextualizing/refreshing/re-presenting the angles of the horses as elemental pivot points. There is also the barely perceptible ghost of what perhaps could have been a first try at placing one of the left x's lines hiding underneath the final layer of white, as if innumerable axes form the architecture of the painting and she has chosen to cover all but those that remain. So much done with seemingly so little.
view2 September 2025
Inventory: view of a stained glass altar through a church door on Nantucket, my shadow birdlike falling over a slatted bench, long blue laundry center in Flushing, tug of war with a dog, tiny black voids, orange spray paint on steel coverings, rusted apartment railings, fire escapes into the sky, shadows on and crevices in Manhattan pavement, bright white/chrome/yellow (New York subway), sky striking the horizon light a lightning bolt between buildings, sunlight wrapping around the corner of a Manhattan skyscraper, orange vent with steam, cello and violin screeching into a dark bar filled with people who didn't come to listen, end of a three-pronged Long Island City railing spray painted orange/blue/turquoise/yellow/pink and red.
view31 August 2025
Great little essay on the use of language in contemporary painting by Jonathan (Tignor) from the latest entry to his Malerblöd Substack (subscribe to it if you're reading this). Especially the bit where he explains: “Language is hardly stable, but against the backdrop of an abstract painting, there is an illusion of stability.”
He addresses Daisy Parris's painting Portrait of a Poem, pointing out how “the third poetic panel is the most successful to [him] because it operates like the Basquiat above [Untitled (Tar Tar Tar, Lead Lead Lead), 1981]. “Haven’t / Wrote” is barely legible through the blast of paint. It is says more by saying less.”
That immediately made me think of Jasper Johns's Flag (1954-55), which I just saw at MoMA in New York. It's nearly impossible to find an image online that is high-quality enough to decipher the tiny words contained in the bits of newspaper articles caked in encaustic, but up close in person there were many great little moments that I could imagine must have been quite satisfying for him to push back and pull forward. Remembering a small section in particular of one of the flag's stripes where most of the newsprint is covered, but the end of a sentence about someone “going into shock” is legible. That to me felt like a nice example of language being used to expand rather than prescribe.
view29 August 2025
Another thing Olivia's work prompted me to think about: how Ed Ruscha says he was originally attracted to words because “words have no size.” Wanted to know what she would think of that, and further if she regards words as having weight, because “RHYME” and “BAROQUE” are almost like sandbags in the context of the paintings they appear in in her show. They drive the paintings down, the bisection of their circular wooden bases made even more emphatic. Perhaps this is a good place to mention the 2007 MIT study I recently learned about that concluded that Russians, who have two different words for lighter blues (“goluboy”) and darker blues (“siniy”) were able to discriminate between colors faster than English speakers when tasked with describing blue stimuli that spanned the siniy/goluboy border. In this way, language quite literally is color. Or at least is key in our cultural understanding of it. So perhaps the connoted size and weight of words changes with their cultural context, which is an interesting idea to investigate.
view27 August 2025
So many thing to unpack from seeing Olivia van Kuiken's show (Bastard Rhyme at Matthew Brown) and visiting her studio after. Firstly: her free-standing, double-sided paintings with pictorial images on their front sides greeting the viewer upon walking into the space and monochrome color blocks on their backs that turns the space into a color field installation when the viewer reaches the back of the room. This was a remarkable effect—the front sides engage with and are perhaps completed by the viewer, the audience key to their resistance of the extradiegetic gaze (especially the three bust paintings that are on the left side when you walk in, each one averting their eyes from the possibility of that fourth wall fracture in spite of their centered positions). They're human-size and human-like, their implied momentum often pushing from left to right, trying to escape the edges of their containers to the periphery. But once at the back of the room, their muted monochrome (dyed canvas) backsides create a sense that they've turned away, subservient to the high-hung untitled work that pays homage to the installation of Malevich's 1913 suprematist square in 1915's The Last Exhibition of Futurist Painting 0.10. At Olivia's studio I told her about someone walking into the show while I was absorbing the color field, and how I immediately hid behind one of the works to avoid them, averting my gaze in the process.
view25 August 2025
Ken Price, Primal, Physical, Sensual at Matthew Marks Gallery, one of the best shows I've seen in a while (despite that title). First time seeing his work in person. The sanded-down mottling on the ceramic sculptures is a technical wonder for sure, but it's the clarity of thought, bold simplicity of his formal juxtapositions, and constant undertone of his sense of humor that makes it such a pleasing sampler. Especially edifying in its directness after seeing Olivia van Kuiken's show yesterday, which is equally effective but eschews directness at every possible turn. Price's forms naturally evade concretization, but they don't hide from it (as is the case with Love affair, 2008, ink on paper). And horniness is somehow endearing in his hands. But Specimens on Pillow Bases (1965, graphite, acrylic, and colored pencil on paper) left the strongest impression on me. Something like a drawn study, the word “pillow” appearing three times as a brand on different views of indented platforms holding the specimens—plans for them to be made plush. A hierarchy, a mountain to climb, a multitudinous proposition.
view23 August 2025
Looks like you (working title): the main focal point—bird and its shadow—handled delicately such that detail/form is present but nearly imperceptible as it's only implied by brushtrokes. That one element is working well enough to not really need anything around it to muck it up, so I just washed around it in white and the question became whether or not more could be had from a supporting cast. The white adds a nice contrast and another level of abstraction that frames the bird and shadow with an almost dog-hand-shadow shape, which I must admit I love. But it somehow still feels kind of empty. Thinking of the ongoing conversation with Jonathan around how negative space should ideally be in service of something. But maybe we don't always need to be aware of what it may or may not be serving.
view21 August 2025
Image inventory: monolithic black men's room partition in Reykjavík–Keflavík Airport, receding airplane windows from the outside, airplane engine, security camera couple, charity shop shelving, black cat pausing before crossing over the shadow of a street lamp, Sistine ceiling, bird looking at (possibly trying to intimidate) its shadow, front patio DIY Stonehenge made out of bricks, sock on a fence, hat covered in wet orange leaves, finch sunning its wings, Yena floating above a tree in a reflected hotel bed, man carrying a human-sized cross through Carnival, Max and a squirrel meeting on the mound at Yankee Stadium.
view19 August 2025
W.S. Merwin on the plane—Yena's copy of his collection Garden Time, written (partly dictated to his wife) when he was losing his eyesight in his 80s. Simple, visceral, stark, gentle, clear, like I can fit my body in the space between the words. Brought to mind the minimal album art of Masayoshi Fujita's Bird Ambience, a letter “i” broken down into the relations between its constituent components. Or Donald Judd's 100 untitled works in mill aluminum (1982–1986). Light, reflection, darkness, space, shadow, clarity, contrast, time all and all time.
view17 August 2025
Orbital set: a solid, robust subject handled with restraint in thin washes is a good premise, but that can't be the whole thing, and I think this one successfully transcended it. What introduced itself was an extreme flattening, something that gave it the feeling of a 2D film set background, yet still implied a cyclical motion, a living quality. Which might have to do with the buzz of the layers—watercolor, two layers of loose but thick vertical touches, a layer of thin washy vertical lines, and a final application of vertical pencil. All of that clashing with the horizontal grain is fun. An effect I'm aiming to expand on in a new one (placeholder title Stand-in—focused on a fenced-in wood cutout of a body wearing a high-vis vest and construction gear based on a site I saw near Blackheath while visiting Gavin).