By Kim Nicolini
“Had a little time to kill. Was going to write about Art I Don’t Like for a change, but then decided that I wanted to do some short takes on art I do like. I’ll write about art I don’t like later. It will be funny. Here are a few tidbits that I found that I like in my new issue of Artforum. There are many more but need to stop here.
Eberhard Havekost
Schwabing II WD, 1998
Oil on canvasI like this painting because it’s a painting that looks like a photograph. Because it’s everything I’m not able to do with my art. It’s understated, bland, disciplined, minimalist yet effective. It is restrained, and the emotion exists in the erasure of emotion. It’s a painting that is grounded in reality but reduced to abstraction and resistant to romanticization. It’s a void. I have never been able to be a void in art, so I admire a void when it’s done well.
Rita Ackermann
Fire by Days XXXVI, 2011
Enamel, oils, pigment, wax, spray paint on paperIt’s pretty. It’s alive. It’s roiling with color. It’s organic but painted with spray paint. It’s an organ beating, bleeding, unashamed of saturating the surface with color, but it also partly comes from a can. It indulges in beauty and materiality which isn’t altogether a bad thing.
Ryan Foerster
Photograph
I don’t know title or yearIt’s a memory, a dream in vivid color. The trace remains of walking streets alone at night. A smear of the past washed into color and the silhouette of disappearance. Something that once happened. Something that never happened. A movie playing on a single screen at the back of a closet. No one watches it, but everyone remembers it.
Natalie Frank
Inspection, 2010
Oil on canvasPaint thick as shame, merging discomfort and color, flesh and the bristles of a brush. Sometimes wrongs can be made right with the right amount of pigment, texture and application of paint. Paint as confession, document of history, or just something you hang on the wall and stare at while it stares right back at you.
Alberto Burri
Combustione Plastica (Plastic Combustion), 1958
Burnt plastic and acrylic on canvasSomething beautiful can come out of something destroyed. The stench of chemicals and burnt plastic, the body of toxic materials melts, reforms, fills your nose and your eyes with waste molded into art. Even holes, places that have completely disintegrated and vanished into nothingness, contain delicate secrets that can blow your mind with their potential for sublime transcendence.
Steve McQueen
Exodus, 1992–97
Super 8 film, silent, transferred to digital videoI haven’t seen the film, but I know it’s time for an Exodus, time for a departure, to leave the grainy memory of sidewalks, erase the faces, turn the corner and never go back.”
art in and around South Florida
