Mathieu Malouf

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  slant October 2017

  Michel Houellebecq

  IN HIS 2016 BOOK Mémoires d’outre-France, Gavin Bowd, a lifelong Marxist and close friend of Michel Houellebecq, reminisced about a night spent drinking with the novelist in Paris’s thirteenth arrondissement. “I will give an interview in which I call for a civil war to rid France of Islam!” Houellebecq exclaimed. “I’ll tell people to vote for Marine Le Pen!” The mini media scandal that ensued following the book’s publication was hardly unprecedented in France, where Houellebecq is known for incendiary declarations. He has also spoken out against a proposed law to fine the (male) clients of

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  picks August 05, 2012

  Manuel Gnam

  The largest and most remarkable work in Manuel Gnam’s latest exhibition is conspicuously absent from the show’s checklist and press release. Made of faux-terrazzo tiles, the piece spreads out from the entrance to the back office, where a series of intricate carvings at its edge create the impression of a wave crashing on Dependance’s artisanal stone-and-tile flooring. If the aquatic motif quickly sends us back to the enigmatic creature lending its title to the show—“Plankton”—the floor-based work also provides an architectural and conceptual framework to consider I went into the net of fishermen.

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  picks April 07, 2012

  Pamela Rosenkranz

  Pamela Rosenkranz’s New York solo debut, “Because They Try to Bore Holes,” features four freestanding hand-molded acrylic glass panels that are hardly visible, save for the subtle optical ripples they effect in the barely furnished exhibition space. Titled “As One” (all works 2012), the series at once occupies and activates the threshold between commercially available supplies and artisanal goods. Similarly courting near disappearance, the works of the show’s titular series, presented in thick white frames on the walls, offer little more for aesthetic consideration than dabs of adhesive mount