Parking sign blacked out. Slightly bent.

Result #1

Parking sign blacked out. Slightly bent. In a black room a series of red or black birds. And every other room, a smear of red, red, red paint in yellow paint, red paint.A piece by Theodore Keller and a work by John Covert. And even a minute by the obvious. And no room: a darkened room, windows, yellow light, sound. The black felt a lot less convincing. But the difference between the two was dramatic. There was no drag, no joke: theres no difference in intensity. Both works are wild and sensational; Keller paints all kinds of places, even places that seem to be empty. Theres no real decoration. The surfaces are painted in a glazeworked, opaque and reflective manner, the paint is off-white, and the colors are done in an infinite variety of hues. The paintings look as if someone had splashed paint in their place. Each work looks as though the paint had poured into the surface. While Keller uses a range of colors, Covert takes only the most intense reds and most saturated blues. The colors he uses are the most vivid. I dont know why Covert seems to be so energetic and so inventive. He seems to be a pretty much single-minded colorist, because he doesnt care what other people think.But theres no question that the paintings are very effective. There is nothing spontaneous in them, no story to be told. The images are vivid and delicate and delicate. The technique is crisp and clear. The finish is beautiful, elegant, elegant. They are beautiful, but not great. But there is an appeal in them, something that is difficult to find anywhere else. And this is why Keller and Covert are so good. These paintings are not innocent. And Keller and Covert make it very clear that theyre not naive.They are serious and intelligent, clear, intelligent. Their paintings are so big theyre very complicated.

Result #2

Parking sign blacked out. Slightly bent. Some shadings, as if to indicate that the weight of that anchor hanging from the tree in the distance and hanging on the top of the laminated wooden box was too heavy for the cords holding it together. But the string was visible, and of course the tree stood there. The first piece in the show, arguably the most striking piece in the exhibition, was an exhibition of A.R. Pencks work, titled The Man of Steel. Not a series of standing isometric figures—whether they were functional or decorative—penciled on top of each other like columns. Pensons steel is like a kind of insulation: The wood is lightweight, because it has been painted or steamed to hide any malleability. The layers of layers of paint are only visible when you have seen the whole work from the front. As with his other works, this one is based on several structural elements that are central to the Man of Steel sculpture. In fact, it is not just the so-called mathematically perfect structural pieces that are in effect; Pensons construction means that everything must be consistent in its parts. They are so diverse and so varied in their material as to be quite reminiscent of sculpture. They are static, as if the architectonic parts of a building had been hidden away and were resting there. These bodies of work may feel like a kind of Easter egg for the Modernists but do not have a connection to the industrial era of the American West.The first of the two works in the show was called Steel Coupling. The second was called Steel Bracing. One of the more interesting pieces in the exhibition was an aluminum sculpture called Bathing House. It consists of two copper brace supports joined at the upper end by a copper brace that stretches from one end to the other. The lower part of the brace is lined with cement, and the upper with plaster.

Result #3

Parking sign blacked out. Slightly bent. I wanted to hop out of the car and fall asleep. A two-foot wall covered in red plastic and painted a deep, dark purple—probably the color of a few spray paint drips. It was a fucking nightmare! This was a nightmare! What were the odds? At the end of the film, Cora takes off down the street, telling us the story that shes been telling us all along: that shes been imagining that night.It is astonishing that a woman can make an entire movie about herself. Jennifer Bartletts recent retrospective shows that there is a lot of imagination in women. We all know, in part or in whole, that we are made up of the same stuff: celluloid, glass, hair, paint. However, when it comes to real life, there is no such thing as imagination, except perhaps in the hands of men. But how long do we keep thinking about how to behave in front of the male gaze?The exhibition contains a long list of works that reveal the disjunction between the representations of man and woman. On the one hand, in some form or another, these films are presented in a setting that negates the naturalism that originally characterizes most of Manchers art. On the other hand, we are confronted with a startling realization of the unfathomable horror and cruelty of our own culture. For example, in the early 80s, the horrors of Vietnam were captured and exposed in such films as Altered States, 1987, or Die, 1991. In this case, Manchers films are echoed in the film noir of the 80s—the murders, the torture, the oppression—with the same inhuman cruelty that permeates his pictures of war. The shows most startling work, perhaps the work that stands out, is a 20th-century cutaway film that features a man in a trench holding a knife to his throat, saying, It hurts. It hurts to hurt.

Result #4

Parking sign blacked out. Slightly bent. In a small gallery, another painted sign. The artist turned away from the picture and leaned back on her folding chair, sipping her drink. What was this? She called out to the viewer as she took a few deep breaths and relaxed into the feeling of having arrived at the very center of her work. Her hand softly caressed the surface of the water. Shes the best painter Ive ever met, the artist says of her work.But if this work gave off the energy of seeing the physical world as something different from the abstract, something more complex and imperfect, then what was it that connects this installation to the previous one? More to the point, the question itself was answered in a series of other projects that had already been conceived and had just been executed. The gallery work, which was represented by two pieces, dates back to 2007 and 2010, and all are based on drawings that allowed the artist to elaborate on the idea of the mural and to explore the mechanisms of drawing. The wall pieces, 2010 and 2010, were based on the same principles of drawing as the murals, but they have been expanded to include all kinds of materials and applied to be worked in different ways. In the basement installation, a series of clay reliefs were brought together with black and white Cibachromes, an abstract technique similar to the one that was used in the murals. The reliefs were overlaid with metal strips that made up two small wooden walls, each one coated with black pigments, and then covered with a layer of polyurethane foam. The polyurethane had been spray-painted with patterns that had been applied to the surface of the wall. The artist then overlays the paintings over these polyurethane-covered surfaces. The result is a temporary structure that mimics the effect of an artist standing in front of an actual wall—which, in the past, she used as an aid in making her works.

Result #5

Thats it. We cant believe this was the beginning of what was to be, a single act of  inversion . . . the image. Theres no theme. We dont know who is looking at the images, we dont know where we stand, we dont know where we are going. Theres no ending. The whole thing is static.The show may be called a new type of reality, a kind of ecstatic tableau that registers our ecstatic recognition of the reality of imagination. It is a phase, a moment, when imaginal fiction is a doorway through which we pass through to understand reality. From within the myth, a picture comes out of an imaginal scene. Or maybe the myth becomes an image.Whatever the case, theres an intensity to this visual field that sears the viewer with an aura of hope and that makes us feel that we are not alone.It is no surprise, then, that the images that make up Bellys work—or to make sense of his images, at least—resemble imaginary scenes. His paintings have an aura of transcendence; its not just that he has mastered a new kind of reality, but that there is an aura of transcendence that makes his paintings paintings transcendently real. Bellos pictures are like serene beach scenes, filled with a kind of miasma of desire, from which we can still glimpse the ocean of sensual reality that stretches beyond it. While it may not look like the ocean, it is really something far beyond, something that is more profound than the surface of water, which seems incapable of realisation. It is not the deep, but the deep, that is the hidden layer of reality, but the latent, the unknown.