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 to the ground. 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, a potentially interesting idea to sit with further.
view27 August 2025
A lot 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 effective—the front sides are 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 figures' 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 and intention, bold simplicity of his formal juxtapositions, and constant undertone of his sense of humor that makes it such a pleasing sampler. An inexhaustible mind. Especially edifying in its directness after seeing Olivia van Kuiken's show yesterday, which 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 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 do like. 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. Or maybe there is a way to make negative space buzz before the subject even enters the frame.
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 the reader can fit comfortably 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, and contrast.
view17 August 2025
Orbital set: a solid, robust subject handled with restraint in thin washes is a good premise to begin with, 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 or medieval manuscript drawing, yet still implied a cyclical motion, a living quality. Which might have to do with the vibration 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).
view15 August 2025
Saw Morandi's work for the first time at the Vatican in the room dedicated to his work. Spent the most time with one of the drawings (can't remember the exact year and it isn't listed on the Vatican's website, but it was a later period one) and two of the still life paintings: Natura morta (1943) and Natura morta italiana (1957). These works alone hold the span of his inquiry and contribution. The former feels like a more or less traditionally handled still life (at least by his standards), but the latter (hung on the adjacent wall, seen first upon entering the space) is thinner, less layered, more loosely handled, and to me more playful—the gray oval representing the inside of the tallest vessel in the composition floats above a table of the same shape and color; the vessels as wireframes in the way they are so well known in his work. Which is even more evident in the aforementioned drawing, which remains almost like a bead maze even with prolonged looking. To my memory, his work was the only work in the contemporary part of the museum's collection that wasn't overtly religious in subject matter, yet his devotion is so palpable that it feels right at home in that context.
view13 August 2025
The intensity of Michelangelo's The Last Judgment on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel was unlike anything I've ever experienced. The same can be said for the ceiling, but I'm just going to focus on that fresco for now. The sheer humanity of it. A writhing procession of flesh. Flesh is the first word that came to mind when I walked into the room—the way the flesh is handled as the eye descends from the saved in heaven to the damned in hell is a masterfully subtle gradation as the eye travels, but a stark contrast when the piece is taken in as a whole; the bodies in heaven are luminous and lightened, while the devils and hell-bound figures have greyed, darkened, filthy-looking flesh. It's a logical, perhaps inevitable, yet still ineffable effect.
I was also struck by how the gears of the piece rotate through figures and forms acting as links between realms—there are many, but what comes to mind first is the flayed skin held by St. Bartholomew that sags toward the figure becoming aware of his own damnation, who is being dragged into hell by a devil plunging through the air by the weight of the black shadow wrapping his back. This sequencing is an example of how the painting's connective tissue hides in plain sight. It's uncanny in how its spaciousness is jam-packed; sky and clouds suspend its 300+ figures to create an atmosphere that flattens the whole scene into a cohesive tidal wave while still stretching negative space into an all-encompassing container.
But back to the humanity. I recognize that I'm arriving at this outlook from a privileged perspective given how little organized religion has impeded my personal freedoms, but to me the depicted dichotomy between the two afterlives immediately felt first and foremost like a representation of the full possible spectrum of human emotion and sensory experience. From the mystical wonder of spiritually fulfilled souls to the tormented anguish of those doomed by never having served a purpose beyond themselves, I found it to be remarkably rooted in this physical world. Pope John Paul II called the work a “sanctuary of the theology of the human body,” which rings true—the mashed mass of bodies left a brain-like imprint on my memory, almost like each limb was a gyrus coalescing into as complete a picture of consciousness as I've ever encountered.
view11 August 2025
Image inventory: Intercoursal bodies, waves, eight-legged organisms, trees, pools, mushrooms, shadows, pigeons, Air Force oath renewal family photo circa 1963 (American flag in the background), reflections in silverware, braiding hair, pen out of ink, hand out of pen, forests, lumberjacks, chips, cuts, cracks, voyeuristic compositions, arrows, wet leaves, holding hands, buzzed hair, cameras, interviews, blood on rocks.