print January/February 2021

John Bauer

In “Trollbunden—John Bauer och den magiska naturen” (Spellbound—John Bauer and the Magic of Nature), we are led into the dark heart of the Swedish artist’s style as it reflects a fin de siècle gothic revival in its levitating perspectives, processional poses, and tenebrous palette folded into the melancholic atmospheres of Nordic folklore. Equally committed to wandering through the mythic as a forest of symbols were Bauer’s belle epoque contemporaries such as his fellow Swede Agnes de Frumerie, Finland’s Akseli Gallen-Kallela and Hugo Simberg, Denmark’s Louis Moe, and Norway’s Theodor Kittelsen,

diary October 31, 2019

Monster Mash

LET’S BEGIN WHERE MY FAIR WEEK ENDED, feeling left for dead lying on a bed, under an eldritch green glow emanating from some mysterious source (art?) at the Normandy Hôtel, a Haussmannian relic under partial renovation in the first arrondissement, where the Finnish collective the Community were hosting their inaugural salon. Evocative of something between a haunted house, a Kubrick film set, and, less excitingly, an art fair, the salon’s setting promised to channel the wicked fun of art’s unruliness, theatricality, and imaginative displacements. Yet as I moved through the hotel’s narrow corridors,

picks August 04, 2019

Davide Stucchi

To speak of a perfume’s sillage is to evoke the trail of scent that follows its wearer, to contemplate how a fragrance diffuses around a body, or, more metaphysically, to consider what lingers in the air after one has left the room. Sillage, in other words, is an afterlife: the ghost of a scented body, a projection. Sometimes it fades fast, while other times it hangs heavy in the atmosphere, not unlike lovers who leave lasting imprints, or mental images that dwell with varying shades of clarity. Such trails of sense, skin contact, and romance make up the conceptual underpinning of Davide Stucchi’s

picks December 31, 2018

Darren Bader

By now, it is standard practice for Darren Bader to excavate the soft luster and mutability of certain aesthetic horizons. Enter his illusory oeuvre and find incursions, disintegrations, and restructurings of the familiar faces and facades of the art world. In Bader’s exhibition at Blum & Poe, “character limit,” he pushes this methodology further, asking: What happens to an economy of means when you engage what scholar Eve Sedgwick called elsewhere the “epistemologically unstable shimmer of allusion and, sort of, possibility”?

Tossing aside curatorial savoir-faire, Bader has strewn around the

Sabrina Tarasoff