feeling dark green brown, dirt in a luxurious sphere, the grounded shadow of the ground, in a plastic sun. a hug to the inhospitable sailor. the mild haze of the invisible tactile

Result #1

feeling dark green brown, dirt in a luxurious sphere, the grounded shadow of the ground, in a plastic sun. a hug to the inhospitable sailor. the mild haze of the invisible tactile sign, but less distracting than a lot of the Space Age interiors. a creative and easy painting, almost a flowchart for a painting. some cute drawings on paper. the silly vulpine and ultra-clumsy tangent to the Sculpture of the Twenty-First Century. a lush image of some girl with her knees up, like a Carl Andre puppet, a ballerina costume, and green ballet slippers; and a jar of Hello Kitty on the ceiling, a romantic foreshadowing of the ironic postmodernism that now dominates art.A left-hand woman stands in a hallway, wearing a vaguely dreamy white faux-fur suit, a long black handle on her belt, and a pair of steely black shoes. Her right hand has a badly broken hickey, her left hand is bloody from a punch to the jaw, and she has apparently tried to choke herself. Her skirt is ripped open, and she is holding a pair of cutouts, either falling from the ring, or having her hair blown up and pulled up. Is she a stripper, a hooker, or a superhero? Im not sure. But this is a horrible scene. A lot of violence, a lot of sad. There is a lot of sultry material for art-school ass-backing-up, but the only real pleasure is in the cruel irony of it all. A rapist/sensual is a female impersonator/heroine. A costume is less an enhancement than a prosthetic, a prosthetic cannot be effaced by what it covers. Its the one dress a woman wears, but it is not good enough. As a woman, she is weaker than a man, not as an act of violence. (Analized to a degree that is almost beside the point, her vagina being on the other side of the picture; and it doesnt change the real point of the thing either.

Result #2

and tactile beauty of the bird. A drawing of a winged figure, looking at the shore, and a black band around the hinged kite, this alone is a conclusively minimalist gesture, a tranquil signature. the middle finger of a finger, and it is a no-holds-barred challenge to a loving tribe, to draw an immortal, icon of the great new order of the open sea. The black painted bird in the middle of the last drawing, apparently in a dream, could be an image of the impotent god Ganesh, or he might just be looking at himself in the mirror as a celestial figure.If Koonss work represents the purification of the city, Bradleys makes of it a vestige of the underworld. The tableaux of which the artist says they are work about the underworld but which again reflect an urban mind-set have the hallmarks of the underworld, but they are the work of a seemingly ancient and animalistic sensibility. Bradleys work is a kind of popular religious art, like a Nordic dance to Odin or an initiation rite. The imagery is heavy with mysticism. But Bradleys is not merely spiritual, or rather psychedelic. The more he pays tribute to the past, the more sharply he points to it. As he says, These paintings have a tragic dimension. They are old stuff. There is nothing overly charming about them. They have a weakness for morbidity. The presence of an older, more cultured sensibility is about as disturbing as the ghosts and dream imagery of Krzystof Wodiczkołkowski. Bradleys is a more casual image, more good-natured than the sort of mysticism that can be traced to any number of Eastern figures. Its only a suggestion, though, that perhaps the combination of this approach with a later, more open-ended, more abstract approach will yield a more authentic and less sentimental expression.

Result #3

feeling dark green brown, dirt in a luxurious sphere, the grounded shadow of the ground, in a plastic sun. a hug to the inhospitable sailor. the mild haze of the invisible tactile texture of the timber, the swirling, not a calm, but a look of something ancient, and something quite savage, or at least functional. even the little cotlids sagging power, the enormous, man made, towering armature, the irregular cubes and squarish openings between the floating and rigid structures, the apparently convincing disjunction of the typology of symmetry. and then the flash of a lightning bolt, lightning a motion of rupture, breaking the suddenness of the event and putting a chill on the reception of the golden mean . . ., another burst of force. and a flash of light, flash of energy, a flash of activity. and then the now pulsing, a pulsing realization, an idea of history, a spark of rebirth, and finally, as if the projection of time itself had become a reflection on the certainty of a human stamp. a clear and decisive moment. And then the touch of the heavy brush, and then the dust . . . the swirling of mists . . . and the rustling of the wind, to remember the things of all those early-twentieth-century artists, all over the place, ranging in time from the cold war (when there was no television, an object was thought of as both coming into being and not, the place of history), to the wind. and the distant sound of a steam engine, the sound of the wind, which has a hand like an arm, a hand that, in the second half of the century, has come to represent time. The place of art. The center of the European scene, and what for the artist has been called the front of the universe. On the other hand, the root of the Modern is history, the path of the soul. One would think that all of the artists chosen to participate in this exhibition, though separated by many years, could be traced to the first moments of Modernism.

Result #4

object. a that can only be a passing dream. the dark wall and the noise of his own machine. the literal and figurative contrast between the figure and the earthy substance.

Result #5

alchemist. However, in his recent works, Mayer has become a kind of mischief maker, because of the way he reenacts the tragedy of human dreams and ritual experiences in a dark, almost vomitous world. That is, the paintings, pictures of abstract mannequin forms, show the archetypal mannequin in his enormous gestures, with its emotional and sexual unconscious at its center. Mierle Ladermano (Man in Red), 1992, depicts a naked male figure with his legs spread wide, having performed an orgiastic sex act, a furtive kiss, at a strange ceremonial sexual moment, in which, according to a popular legend, he actually ejaculates and destroys his own penis, temporarily and permanently.In this way Mayer seems to be engaged in a dialectic with the most prominent figures of our times, from the Prime Minister to our president. The figures of our memories, the mannequin, are the subjects of his works; they are both archetypes and symbols, each symbol representing a violent or fearful sexual encounter. These and the older works of his predecessors—those with which Mayer returns with this show—convey a dreamy, dreamlike quality, as if they were mannequins whose interior lives and dreams were the seeds for the icons of his graphic work. The artists own dreams, then, are the themes of his work, which is combined with the dreams of others, of who we are—more or less. This art is at once an essential part of the dream-world and a mask, a protection against the other. In the contemporary art world, Mayer still performs this dual function, but now we are free to look at his work in a completely different way.