Una resena de Teddy responde de stranger things

Result #1

Una resena de Teddy responde de stranger things (Oh Boy Stranger Things), 2018, also on view, teases out a kind of surprisingly personal psychological horror on the contours of existence. The studio floor is covered with small, round, painted cement blocks, on which Swafford, seated in his predilection for a more visceral relationship to his materials, has layered tiny images of feet, hands, and heads; the consistency of his adhesion to his initial material is inescapable. The distended interior of the unnamed living room, whose entranceway has been entirely removed, is likewise a monstrously evocative work of surreal space-time, with a pair of steps leading nowhere, just beyond the threshold of escape.Surprisingly, the rest of the show was less resolutely personal in tone than the first, for all the way in which Swafford shows his weary-ass melancholy—about no one at all, not even himself. Although his depiction of living rooms and bedrooms in Milan, for instance, is based on what appears to be his own bedroom in Italy, the works basic form is one of the most typical of monochrome paintings in modern painting, from the early 60s to the 80s. As one lingers in a darkened room, one sees Swaffords paintings, usually but not always his own, to be often as dark and strange as the space they inhabit. In a long row of portraits, Swaffords biggest-city-in-america doll house, we see him posing, typically, in the clothes he is wearing. And like the titular house, his vision of life, as opposed to art, is a world in which suffering has an all too real existence. It is a world filled with the most extreme of nightmares, with the worst crimes.There is an unerringly meditative quality to Swaffords subject matter, even in a show that presents a combination of raw, unprimed surfaces.

Result #2

Una resena de Teddy responde de stranger things (Why Stranger Things Are Easier), a play on words both explicit and ambiguous. In the first, the subtitle is a dig at Donald Trumps sly meme of the same name. The second is the answer, on a more indirect level, to the question of how to respond to this monstrous creature: Ask yourself what you want to be. Equally indifferent, the third passage, The Next Time, hints at a more immediate experience, to be more like it: Think of your own interior.In previous works, Resenada made painting-like forms of her clay: drawings, collages, and tattoos. The modernist architects of modernist architecture, therefore, seem to have drawn a parallel to modernist sculpture: to constructions that reveal their internal structures through physical means, and act as a means for articulating the structures perceived, internal logic. Thus, in Resenadas work, the human body is a means to an end, not only an instrument of movement, but also an object that places on display all the internal logic of the constructions. In his subsequent works, the body is also a means to an end, to a group of necessary but not explicit symbolic fragments: a diagrammatic grid, a photographic memory of a previous, not yet complete, scene, or a continuity between the past and the future. In the new work, the body is now identified with each of the various parts of the sculptures internal logic. The wooden forms are organized in a grid, with the pieces in ascending order of appearance: Recto ázquina (Recto recto), 1997, consists of a looped piece of folded paper in the shape of a diamond, and ¡Me plaga para los ázquina a imagina (Can You See These Forms), 1997, consists of a drawing on canvas of the same composition, the result a grid.

Result #3

(My Stranger Things Are Not So Cool), 2004, is both a hidden message and a direct act of appropriation, establishing a tacit but clear relationship with Tinkertoys culture. The two works embody two interrelated spaces, neither of which is specifically known. Two mutually exclusive worlds collide and mesh, with no single point of origin, no single point of reference, and no single definitive identity. A vast array of little red dots and crosses is used to represent the common object, like the logos of the tech industry. Yet it is also a domain of possibility, a space where non-conformity, from serious to juvenile, is possible. It is also a space in which there is nothing sacred, only forbidden, and this is where we find the dominant force of the Tinkertoys experience. For this reason, the work is also a sign of the stagnation of history, a place of magic, of a need for intellectual and emotional renewal.

Result #4

Una resena de Teddy responde de stranger things (Residue of the Stranger Things), 1998, is made of the viscous, viscous residue of a previous engagement with the material world.This work was organized and displayed in a deeply strange, attic-cum-spatial setting by the artist, who chose to call the interior space of the gallery an empanada (and therefore haunted house), while also considering it a recording chamber, in which the sounds of her own troubled inner life are projected. Two small ballroom-style rooms were the centerpiece of this elaborate installation. In one, four monitors were installed at three levels, one at each end, displaying an unusual combination of deviously staged scenes. A small black-and-white screen was projected above a low-lit, fast-food-filled wall. Between these and the spindly, gray-striped legs of the couch was the bodies left behind by a beloved male figure who has apparently passed away. The sculpture towered over the living-room couch, its hard-edged limbs suggestive of an actual corpse. In the other two rooms, the figures of male performers were arranged in neat rows—like a classic anatomical motif—to create the illusion that the rooms were inhabited by ghosts. One seated figure, two legs hanging limply off the bed, lay on a couch; the other wore a blue satchel, bloodred by a shotgun blast. The strange props were enough to make anyone think of a ghostly version of the material world, but it was these props that opened the door to the ghosts and made the skeletons seem real. In this light, de Mestre, who had lived her entire life in the Paris suburbs, embodied the spirit of Paris as a ghostly place and an urban space haunted by a violent, spectral presence.The installation did not purify the space. Instead, it evoked the ghosts of Paris, that city of ghosts and of the people who live there, in an eerie, indirect way.

Result #5

Una resena de Teddy responde de stranger things (New Realities: Other Works by Teddy, 1949–1985), which were also on view here. Dubbed New Realities by archivists Walter Salles and Stephen King, these works represent some twenty years of work with the same vibrant materials and textures that would be used in the Cézanniques. For example, Salles brilliantly elegant stained-glass pieces from the 1950s and 60s; the garments and scarves from the 40s; and the human forms from the 50s are on view. These are not works that we tend to associate with late twentieth-century American art—some of the best of the artists produced in this show are certainly not—but they continue to excite our memories. They are also less abstract than we might expect, much less to our liking.Rafael Elício, whose work is also on view in the show, is known for his eclectic mix of public and private objects and objects that resemble natural phenomena. His naturalistic sculptures and objects from the 60s and 70s are remarkable for their individuality. However, in these recent exhibitions, he sometimes seems more interested in the properties of materials than they are in their function. A striking example of this attitude is the series of large diaphanous, pipelike forms from the 40s, in which texture and fabric are not at odds. Yet, for all its decorative qualities, these works show Elícios zeal for texture, to use a metaphor he often uses for his abstractions. In one of the more significant works in the show, Elício created a series of large, woven-canvas reliefs from the 50s and 60s in which the fabric is spliced and woven. Because they are made up of different lengths of fabric, they do not conform to any logical pattern. It is as though each is a separate entity.