Desert Casino

‘The volume of Kauffer’s poster output, as well as the frequent changeover of posters in London’s transport system, meant that the city’s hurrying commuters and pedestrians experienced his images repeatedly in their daily lives. As a contemporary critic observed, Kauffer eagerly responded to the quickening pace of contemporary life, designing posters for the fast-moving public and aiming to express the message in the simplest and most direct form. He evoked a different fo...rm of swift communication, among the fastest known at the time, in describing the poster as not unlike a terse telegram that gets to the point quickly. The emergence of new and efficient ways of communicating and traveling in the first half of the twentieth century provided Kauffer both with abundant new clients and with subjects for posters from air mail and telephones to ocean liners and trains.’ See more

‘Berryhill’s Day-Glo palette, which shares something with Odilon Redon’s rich, ethereal color and Raoul Dufy’s heightened ambient light, seems inspired by painting’s past as much it is by the fluorescent artifice of computer screens. However, the hues and combinations he attains are all his own, as is his technique of applying them. In contrast to Willem de Kooning and others who liked to draw with a loaded brush, Berryhill uses a small brush and dry brushstrokes to apply his pigments, often to a surface that he has scraped down, leaving ghostly shapes. At times his method bears comparison to raking an oil stick across a rough surface, but he possesses far more control, nuance, and delicacy than that would suggest.’ John YAU

‘Levinthal’s palette is muted, dominated by gray, which she builds ups with layers of thin, semi-transparent washes, and scrapes down with a razor. Her subjects are all close to home: herself and her family, friends, and colleagues. Her ability to embed details within the painting is one of her many strengths. At a time when the art world seems to prefer the overt, Levinthal has elected to go down a very different path, one that pursues gradations of feeling and doubt. Rather than telling us something, each of her works gently and tenderly pushes us to ask: What is going on?’

'Thanks in no small part to Carriera’s skill and clever marketing, pastel portraits became one of the most popular art forms of the Rococo and Enlightenment eras. There was much to like about pastels: the colors were bright and mixed easily, pigments didn’t need to dry, which led to shorter portrait sittings, and the portable pastel sticks allowed artists to draw from anywhere. (As far as artistic gadgets go, if oil painting was a bulky desktop computer then pastel was a smartphone.) And since Carriera saw pastel’s potential before her fellow Venetian artists did, she dominated the market for quickly made, lightweight portraits that appealed to high-end tourists. Oberer writes: This trade became hers.'

‘No matter where one stands on the Gorgon/Medusa divide, the one thing on which everyone seems to agree is that it was during the classical Greek period that the Gorgoneion’s dramatic transformation took place. The mask was softened and feminized until it became unrecognizable. One by one, the beard, tusks, and even the telltale tongue and wide-open eyes were gone, leaving only the serpents as a sign that something might be amiss with this otherwise ethereal female face. Given that the serpents were an obvious phallocentric choice, it is no surprise that Hellenic culture eventually replaced the Gorgoneion with the phallus as its preferred apotropaion against the evil eye. All that was left of the archaic Gorgoneion was an angry woman.’

'Tomlinson addresses, with refreshing clarity, a chronic question of just how independent, not to say subversive, Goya was of the powers that employed him. She debunks a common oversimplification of Goya as a committed post-Enlightenment liberal. He was more complicated than that, and ineluctably strange. Uncanniness had to be part of his magnetism. There’s often something haunted or haunting in his portraits and in some of his religious and allegorical commissions, though no...t in the antic cartoons of Spanish life that were destined for tapestries, an irksome duty of his early career. It’s as if he always had something up his sleeve. That impression affected me strongly on a visit to the Museo del Prado, in Madrid, last year. Looking at his works can rouse the sensation of an alarm going off nearby, but you can neither understand the reason for its activation nor find it to turn it off.' See more

‘The grid is useful in that regard. It allows me to exist in a specific place in painting. Now, after all these years, I have tried making discreet changes to the grid, using algorithms and equations to play around with the space more. The paintings still fall into the grid format but they are getting more complicated. The paintings have more natural expression and more color. The paintings always have an internal logic. Everything looks logical, even if they are made with less than logical means. I am accepting that, and trying to let the logic reveal itself to me. In the past, I made big statements about how everything is determined. Therefore, my paintings should be determined. I always executed my paintings, top to bottom. For survival, I have had to loosen up on that theory’

'In Armonía, a thin, androgynous figure sits serenely at a desk, arranging various glowing trinkets including crystals, leaves, a turnip, and seashells as notes onto an invented music-making device. Ghostly, dust-blue figures materialize in the cracking paint of the walls, assisting in the musical arrangement. Translucent sheets and stubborn, curious plants respectively flutter and poke out from beneath the muted, multicolored floorboards. Two birds have laid a pair of eggs in the crimson upholstery of a chair; mid-flight, one of the birds exits an open door frame that leads into a smoggy, rust-colored abyss. It’s easy to get lost in Varo’s work.'

'Given her experience studying fashion as an undergrad and working in advertising, Belanger is keenly aware of how visuals communicate and connect with people. She has a really insider perspective on what sells, and why certain things are sexy, Smith-Stewart said. I love how she says ‘a well-manicured hand can sell anything.’ She understands also how gender permutates, and how it sets the stage for what sells. The work has what she calls like this ‘odd and lush’ sensibilit...y that ensnares you. But then when you look deeper, you see this darkness, but there’s so much humor to it, and it has this feminist agency. I mean, who doesn’t love beautybut it’s so great when you know how to weaponize it. Through the Eye of a Needle presents an array of Belanger’s signature ceramics, many perched on furniture pieces, like an upright piano covered in gray fabric. I was looking at grand houses that are closed down for the season, Belanger explained. I thought it was really interesting how each piece of furniture had a slipcover made to fit it that sort of turned these furnishings into odd ghosts and indicated that their use was on pause. I thought that that was a great metaphor for the way that a person grieves.' See more

'This ominous Klansman figureor painter in penitential hoodappears again in Bad Habits, 1970, where the penitent tries to atone for sins of the bottle by flagellating himself, as in Piero’s Flagellation. The booze bottle looms large, out of scale with the human figures, perhaps indicating the importance that alcohol occupies in his own life. Paintings like these brought Guston into the limelight again; in response to a 1970 exhibition, Hilton Kramer accused him of being a ...Mandarin Pretending to Be a Stumblebum, while Harold Rosenberg lauded him for his Liberation From Detachment, and Robert Hughes described the work as Ku Klux Komix. The show sent shock waves throughout the artworld. Why did you want to go and ruin things? asked one painter angry at Guston for negating allegorical and abstract classicism. Only de Kooning, of all Guston’s peers, remained calm, assuring Guston that there was no problem: This is all about freedom. ' https://www.artforum.com/pri/198008/gust-gusto-guston-35781 See more

‘As more of her personal history is unearthed by scholars, a more complex picture emerges. And Artemisia’s art is increasingly being appreciated for the knowingness with which she made use of elements of her lifenot just sexual violation but also motherhood, erotic passion, and professional ambition. Artemisia recognized that being a woman offered her a rare perspective and authority on many artistic subjects. You will find the spirit of Caesar in the soul of a woman, she once assured a patron. Such insight makes Artemisia feel, four hundred years after she lived, like one of our more self-aware contemporaries.’

‘Late in May 1606, two years after the artichoke incident, Caravaggio lost a wager on a game of tennis against a man named Ranuccio Tomassoni. A fight ensued, in which several others participated, and Caravaggio was injured in the head, but he ran his sword through Tomassoni, killing him. After two days of hiding in Rome, he escaped the city, first to the estates of the Colonna family outside Rome, and then, near the end of the year, to Naples. He had become a fugitive.’

‘These paintings are both material and transcendent. Their compositions are asymmetrical, positioning arcs and ovals in the upper half of the canvas. Frecon’s reductive formal vocabulary permits uncanny figure/ground relationships, with the two often appearing interchangeable, suggesting a transient quality despite their scale and physicality.’