picks June 15, 2020

Diego Bianchi

Diego Bianchi’s shows look like burnt plastic smells. For “Soft Realism” at Jocelyn Wolff’s Belleville gallery last year, that plastic was latex—black, thick, and gooey, coating various appendixes as inexorably as birds get oiled. Now, at “Sauvetage Sauvage,” the artist draped everything at Wolff’s Romainville location—walls, floors, staff desks—in sheets of transparent plastic. Pristine and crinkly, this material is less evocative of discount sex megastores than of a sanitary limbo: our “new normal” blown up to cathedral-like proportions inside the gallery’s three stories.

A response to the

picks March 13, 2020

Özgür Kar

On a recent winter afternoon, when the light had already waned, I nearly mistook the dim, opalescent hue in the center of this gallery—a whitish screensaver glow—for moonlight. Two large TV screens stand on opposite sides of the room, each of them displaying a line drawing of a male figure who appears against a black, womblike void: a guy under the influence and it is all in his head, both 2020. Linger long enough, and they’ll move, if only imperceptibly so. While these potential twins—their postures fetal and horizontal, respectively—appear deeply asleep, their limbs are too tightly nested

picks December 05, 2019

David Wojnarowicz and Marion Scemama

David Wojnarowicz’s canonization cemented his reception as a forever outcast, the self-proclaimed Rimbaud of a quickly gentrifying New York. The poet, painter, photographer, activist, and filmmaker’s short but prolific career—from the first works in 1978 to his death in 1992—was a teeming and explosive imbroglio of desire, outrage, and mourning. It has been tempting to explain his work, on one hand, as the creation of a timeless “genius,” or, on the other, as a historical document of the East Village scene and AIDS crisis of the 1980s. (These opposing tendencies, both pitfalls in a sense, were

picks October 03, 2019

Valerio Adami

Valerio Adami will forever remain affiliated with the French intelligentsia of the ’70s. Jean-François Lyotard and Jacques Derrida wrote essays about him, and in turn, Adami provided them with a fertile ground on which to implement their idea of art as language—one composed of thick black lines delineating sinewy, fragmented mannequins moving through a flat and shadowless space. Here was an art conceived as a cosa mentale, or “mental thing,” one that would allow one to “think through the eyes” (so Lyotard). A member of the Narrative Figuration group, Adami is a self-described drawer-painter. To

picks June 03, 2019

Wolfgang Stoerchle

Wolfgang Stoerchle’s video Penis with Disney Characters, 1970–72, is pretty simple: A flaccid penis, the artist’s, casually births one miniature Disney character—Goofy, Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck—after another. At the same time, those looped four minutes of repeated nonaction contain the curled narrative of a whole era. The Sony Portapak used by the artist, who was born in 1944 and died in 1976 in a car crash, was a staple of early video art, and connects him to Nam June Paik, Peter Campus, and Bruce Nauman. In 1970, Stoerchle had just started teaching at John Baldessari’s Post-Studio Art program

picks April 17, 2019

Trevor Yeung

Trevor Yeung is averse to close gallery interactions—at least between people. To discourage them, he contrasts works big enough to hide someone (himself, at openings) with tiny ones visitors must bend down to acknowledge. And just like that, you are left alone, face-to-face with closed-circuit microcosms. Plugged into a socket on floor level, plastic mushrooms rear their heads from a clutter of adapters. Like a child’s night-light, the tiny arborescent structure exudes a soft, multihued glow. Yet the effect discomforts. The useless adapters of Night Mushroom Colon (Four), 2017, indicate a

picks March 01, 2019

Cinzia Ruggeri

Like a warm, unlit lightbulb, Cinzia Ruggeri’s sculptural gloves, boots, and dresses suggest a just-vanished human presence. Sure, most of the items could still be worn or used. Some of them may have been. For any fashion connoisseur, Ruggeri evokes emblematic designs of the postmodern era. Closely associated with the Memphis Group, she transposed their geometrical shapes to the body in movement. Take, for instance, Homage to Levi-Strauss—a 1983 dress featuring her trademark ziggurat motif along the collar and skirt. Later, she would become one of the first designers to experiment with electronic

Ingrid Luquet-Gad