This painting makes me feel like I stepped on a piece of lego while wearing wet socks.

Result #1

 I feel naked. I dont mind getting wet, just not the deep, fuzzy sort of wet that takes me everywhere in the world, even, oh God, the ass.Theres a bit of a set-up behind the scenes with the actual paintings on display. Each set of works consists of two of the same size, and the second one in the next room is half the size of the one before. A set of these, painted either red or green, takes the form of a red light (long painted lines crossing the black perimeter of the canvases) and a green light (light traversing the perimeter of the paintings). The subject is the body as it exists in this world, and the two works will most likely be of different sizes, and not just two-dimensional. But, as you move through the show, you have the impression of knowing where the pictures are located and seeing the two is the first room in your mind when you see the show. Of course, theres lots of other stuff in the paintings as well, but this is what the paintings do best. They set you up for the experience and, in some cases, even bring out the subtleties of high modernism. And they put on some real atmosphere.

Result #2

This painting makes me feel like I stepped on a piece of lego while wearing wet socks.  I couldnt figure out whether or not the paintings were being, strictly speaking, painted on the canvas, or simply the legs of a doll, and what the difference between those two possibilities might be. The show also included a number of drawings of folded paper, in which an entire sheet is displayed in front of the paper.  The drawings arent much to look at, but they have something to do with a similar refusal to judge whether theyre paintings or drawings, and a similarly low degree of identification with the viewer.  At least one of the few paintings that has a completely free-standing side view are probably a record of the artists studio, as if the studio were something like a canvass that could have been made anywhere.This is only one example of a different strain of painting that is now becoming widespread in the Bay Area.  A whole room of the San Francisco Museum of Art also featured a work by John Wilson, who was on hand to show the paintings of his former girlfriend, the illustrator Louise McHugh, which he started in 1965.  He showed them again in this exhibition, and they were even more startling, for the McHugh paintings had never been seen in person, only through pressings of other artists work in the latter part of the decade. In a way, Wilson has taken a rather famous sign and transformed it, in a very clever way, into a sort of surreal image, a hallucinatory abstract painting.  It is also an interesting way of doing things that has a very strong literary component, a relation to the kind of painting that is called Abstract.  Wilson has changed the actual canvas from a rectangle into a rectangle, not by painting on it but by painting on the side of the stretchers.

Result #3

—Larry S.

Result #4

By contrast, Rudolphs version is abstract, even formal, with its light-tinted constructions of clay and paint that give the sculpture an even tinge of simple geometry. In the end, however, Rudolph is right in observing that a lot has been left to chance in Rudolphs choice of subject matter, and the strength of his work is not likely to be fundamentally determined by such material choices. If his work has one weakness, it is that he can be overly reliant on a vocabulary that can be read like a strategy guide. The artistic path he is taking will have to be determined by the critical faculties of his own capabilities.

Result #5

This painting makes me feel like I stepped on a piece of lego while wearing wet socks. The context here is a makeshift subway, one that serves as a sort of miniature and utterly unselfconscious transport hub. Their dented, flaking surfaces of that world are an extension of a place that is explicitly, and quite spectacularly, a showroom. Unsurprisingly, a number of art-world establishment types seem to have jumped at this opportunity to join the Manhattan crowd, parading the work around the elevator to the magicians of New Yorks uptown. A number of passersby decided to see to it that their legs and ankles were healed.Many of the works in this exhibition explored the elements of color—the color of the epidermis, the color of the body—while others seemed more concerned with the question of what the taut skin, taut skin was, and how that might relate to the curved section of the gallery wall. Two pieces in particular stood out as particularly thoughtful exercises in this regard: one, El Abajo (The Eye), 2009, was a simple, almost straight-forward three-panel piece of plastic netting stretched around one eye and its counterpart in a silk screen, one eye closed and the other open, the netting functioning as both barrier and glimmer of an unlikely substance. The other was Momento for Christina Véli, 2009, a seamless fabric that suggested a blue sheet of skin, reinforced with mesh and mesh screens. This piece, which resembles a looser denim of a certain age, was just a few inches wide and long enough to be placed high up on the wall in a way that would give the work a nearly sculptural presence. The netting, not quite covering the eye, appeared to simply stretch over the eyes and still onto the skin of the netting, which in turn veined in a winding, skin-like fashion.