Dearest Emma, I miss you, and think it is time that we get back to work…

About four years ago, in the midst of the pandemic’s early days with no one knowing what the future could have held, I received a letter from Marc Camille Chaimowicz, whom I had assisted, about a decade prior, on a Madame Bovary publication by Four Corner Books. It was an invitation and an auspice for a new work, an extension or continuum of the Emma B project. ‘There is more, as yet to be done’, he wrote. And when Chaimowicz calls, you might want to run! If only for taking incommensurable pleasure in the fruits of his labor.

What followed in epistolary form, were images of blooms and moons, and a photographic assignment of Emma Bovary dreaming-and-living California scenarios. The application of a red lipstick and Yves Saint Laurent’s Opium perfume, Emma devouring fashion magazines such as Vogue (Paris edition preferable) and the Financial Times’ ‘How to Spend It’ supplement, the serving of a fruit salad from a large glass bowl, picking wild flowers while kneeling (with the offer of sending paper ones if not readily available), Emma laying on a carpet, wistfully perusing travel guides, languidly window shopping. Her beloved’s hand caressing the inside of her wrist – a moment redolent of tenderness. And lots and lots of jewelry, begged, borrowed and possibly stolen, some worn and some displayed.

Dear Marc Camille, If only I, Emma, had known the places my longing would have took me. If only, If only…

Emma’s technicolor reverie has landed in Los Angeles in all its melancholic, dreaminess and sumptuousness. Entrapped in her solitude, Emma looks outwards, wistfully…into a landscape, so sublime, so troubling, echoing her own existential dilemmas.

Luckily for me, a few pictures I took made it into the Emma pantheon, with Marc Camille seemingly pleased about her wardrobe choices and that dear Emma hadn’t forfeited her shopaholic ways, even during lockdown. On view at Gaga Los Angeles as part of a suite of collages made over the past two years, these images combine fragments of fashion magazines, literary prints, advertising and illustrations, overlapping lace, legs, jewelry and work by other artists in a sophisticated layering of Flaubertian flavor. Borne out of Bovarysme – the condition of domination by such an idealized, glamorized, glorified, or otherwise unreal conception of oneself resulting in dramatic personal conflict, paranoia or tragedy – the collages contribute to an intimate, psychological portrait. If in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, the restrictions of Emma’s inner life are narrated through the description of domestic interiors, in Chaimowicz’s exhibition, a selection of everyday objects – a flower vase, a frutero, folding screens, a magazine rack and a few rugs – accumulates into the depiction of interior life stills, imbued with sentimental depth. The artists offers us a lens onto the pathos and nostalgia we project onto tour nearest objects, those we choose to re-present us, to tell stories with.

Thanks to Chaimowicz, Flaubert’s anti-heroine had never felt so chic, even if trapped in a life constricted by the conservative conventions of her time. Consumerism (shopping!), seduction (the excitement of ill-fated affairs!) and a world of imagination (ever relieving!) offer our Emma, and ourselves, a sentimental escape from a bleak, monotone reality evocative of both pandemic times, and the doom of current ones. Chaimowicz’s world of interiors continues to form my sentimental education, inviting to observe our own melodramas as much as the possibility of elsewhere. I only wish Emma would have stuck around long enough to experience that, too.

– Marta Fontolan

Gaga & Reena Spaulings, LA, present an installation of new paintings and kinetic sculptures by Naoki Sutter-Shudo. End of Thinking Capacity stages a sort of farce or concept of a possible exhibition, with a gang of seven humanoid “critics” performing the work of aesthetic judgement before twelve freshly painted works on canvas.

Mechanical metronomes seem to bring the sculpture-critics to life: the measured, clockwork ticking of the critical faculty, the wagging finger of judgement. Their heads are made by sculpting epoxy clay over doll heads and Halloween skulls, then painted with glossy enamel colors. Sponges, bubble wrap and liquor bottles flesh out the bodies of these figures, which stand upon pedestals of boxed art and lifestyle magazines.

The paintings, meanwhile, vary widely as far as genre and visual content. Imagery taken from book covers and other printed matter betray the artist’s wayward bibliophilic proclivities. There are also paintings of paintings: a scaled-up copy of a composition by Sutter-Shudo’s wife Alexandra Noel, but with an added paintbrush and its shadow; also a portrait of the French revolutionary Saint-Just taken from the cover of a book by Tatsuhiko Shibusawa. Other works depict the Hawaiian flag, a cigarette lighter printed with a slogan that echoes the exhibition’s title, and an outer space scene with glowing Japanese characters (= “stranger” or “foreigner”) and zooming crackers. A cartoonish marine scene is based on an eco-friendly campaign against littering which the artist saw printed on a French cigarette pack. Another canvas references Marine Le Pen’s mother Pierrette’s scandalous appearance, in 1987, as a slutty French maid in the pages of Playboy magazine. There are also paintings depicting cropped fragments of Louis C.K’s illuminated stage set for his Netflix comeback special SORRY. Etc.

End of Thinking Capacity pantomimes the situation of aesthetic judgement, with paintings that summon their own critics and sculptures that seem to do the work of viewing and thinking. If actual human viewers feel sidelined by Sutter-Shudo’s auto-critical installation, which pretends to consume and complete itself, we can now be as delinquent and free-ranging as the artist.

Gravitas is levitated and the critically unemployed viewer is set adrift along with the works, which double as props and performers. Sutter-Shudo locates joy in this experience of release, where art discovers the freedom to play itself: the exhibition and its double.

At first glance it would seem that Vivian Suter’s paintings present their strokes, their textures, their colors plainly to the viewer. Then, at a second moment, one observes their error. These are secret paintings.
Behind each painting, other paintings are hidden, or their arrangement makes it impossible to look at them exclusively from the front: one cannot see them completely from a single perspective. Even in those paintings that are apparently resolved and isolated, it is possible to perceive the layers of invisible paintings. And how do you look at the invisible? How do you look at Vivian Suter’s paintings?

Perhaps, more than seeing them, we should try to read them, because Suter’s paintings unfold before our eyes like the pages of a book. Stains, strokes, colors that make up a text that precedes writing. A text, even before words. A secret poem. What does it say? I would not know how to say it, that is to say, I would not know how to translate it, but the ancient animals and plants that still beat in me understand it.

Or not. Perhaps, better, we should not try to read or understand them, just contemplate them. That is to say, the “I” would have to dissolve in the vision of these paintings so that there is no difference between the gaze and what is looked at, that they are already one and the same mystery. Or perhaps it would be necessary to have the delicacy to almost not look at them, to look at them only with the corner of one’s eye, or not to look at them at all, only to guess at them. Like when one perceives the visit of a hummingbird and decides not to turn to look at it so as not to scare it away. There is something of the hummingbird in these canvases, a very swift stillness.

Or perhaps, on the contrary, the best thing to do would be to look at Suter’s paintings with all the attention possible, that is, with all the love possible, to fix their images in one’s memory and then distract yourself with something else. Try not to think about them for a while. Try to forget them. So that their memory, more and more blurred, ferments in the secret strata of the soul, where our most remote ancestors and the beings we loved and lost still breathe. Until one radiant night we see them again transfigured in our dreams.

You escape into a dark bar in the afternoon in the middle of summer. Air conditioned so much that you shiver. You rest your body on a sofa or bar stool, sipping a cocktail, and the spirits change the feeling in your soul while your gaze wanders into a painting or mural, maybe a combination of a decorative landscape and storybook imagery, perhaps with sexual innuendo. A celebrity or cultural icon may be depicted. Or a deity or scene from another time. It’s a little like looking into a dream, if a dream were like a club you could walk into and order a drink, and if the club contained landscapes, seascapes.
The size of the painting or decorative panels have been determined by the size of the bar or the size of the dining room. Painting adding space to space, for you.
The paintings enhance the effect of the alcohol, food or romance and turn the interior into an escape and a dreamscape. An escape perhaps from motherhood or work or anything quotidian. An hour like this sends you home with a dream to give your life, your child, your wife, your dog. Even death needs an hour like this in a bar sometimes.

Blooming ephebes, female Satyrs, Oriental sages, owls, snakes: we will find them all, as well as Punchinello and Death, within the pages of this book, along with Venus, Time, Moses, numerous angels, Cleopatra, and Beatrice of Burgundy—a motley company always on the go.
Calasso makes clear that Tiepolo was more than a dazzling intermezzo in the history of painting. Rather, he represented a particular way of meeting the challenge of form: endowed with a fluid, seemingly effortless style, Tiepolo was the last incarnation of that peculiar Italian virtue of sprezzatura, the art of not seeming artful.

(on the book Tiepolo Pink by Roberto Calasso, www.penguinrandomhouse.com)

Gaga & Reena Spaulings, LA present Unique Boutique, an exhibition of new work by Maggie Lee.

At the end of 2022, the artist traveled to Alto Hospicio, Tarapacá, Chile, the driest desert on the planet and home to one of the world’s largest dumping grounds for unwanted and unsold clothing. Each year, approximately 39,000 tons of clothing are shipped here from all around the world: fast fashion pollution is a toxic byproduct of online shopping and the algorithms that influence global consumption. Lee returned from Chile with two suitcases packed with garments she dug up from the desert sand, upcycling these into works for her show. Displayed on a rack cobbled together from bamboo poles and twine, various outfits have been assembled from Lee’s sun-stained finds, accessorized with handmade buttons and rhinestones, silkscreen and other alterations. While vintage clothing becomes increasingly rare and unaffordable, the artist makes a long journey to reclaim the rarest, most unwanted garments, digging up fresh looks for 2023.

Welcome to My Depop Store, 2023, is a video shot in Alto Hospicio, Chile. Here we see the artist hunting for clothing in red mountains of sand, improvising what looks like a makeshift pop-up shop, and playing a slide whistle. Lee could be performing the allegorical figure of the “rag picker” from Baudelaire’s poem: a metaphor for the poetic process itself, or the one who generates value from ruins and refuse.

A series of 2022 works on canvas combine paint, gift wrapping paper, glitter, tape, stick-on letters, photocopies, tinsel, feathers and Polaroid images. Emily Ratajkowski, Sydney Sweeney and other models grace Lee’s freeform painting-like assemblages, works she originally produced as a Special Project for Miu Miu’s Fall-Winter 2022 campaign.

“The deer that leads a knight through the forest into the enchanted castle is in reality the princess who lives within.” -PH

Wander & Pursuit presents an anachronistic office environment rendered in bleak color palettes and composed as a symmetric, medieval walled garden adorned with figurative renderings of chivalric symbolism depicting idyllic moments of the hunt and romantic courtship. The show delves on the contemporary construction of a sense of purpose articulated through labor and the way identity is intertwined with ideas of yearning, fantasy, and desire which translate into metaphorical quests for a more meaningful existence.

These chivalric tales of fulfilment and destiny prevail as aspirational narratives of desire and realization reaffirm ideas of success achievable exclusively through the accumulation of multiple forms of capital. How do these narratives dictating contemporary life embody a clash between contradicting desires and fantasies? Does only an alienated nature seek adventure? These allegorical figures of grandness infiltrate our workplaces, which today have expanded beyond their place and into a quotidian setting, leaving the office to become a mere symbol itself, a ruin from a time in our past when life was divided into work and leisure.

Daniela Rossell’s series Ricas y Famosas is a group of photographs which were taken in Mexico over the course of seven years in the late nineties early 00’s. A book was published by Hatje Kantz in 2002 with a selection of 89 works. Daniela lives in Berkley and teaches Drawing and Creative Writing in Stanford University.

Alex Bag’s Twelve Spells (1999) is a series of photographs depicting the signs of the zodiac with 12 portraits of people born under that sign. The figures are shown on black backgrounds in pairs or alone, and are drawn from a friend group of artists and performers. They are styled to depict different musical tribes with their requisite signifiers, and Alex Bag’s signature initial “A” appears in red on each of the subject’s necks. Each sign under the influence it’s drug of choice. The whole series was first shown at American Fine Arts, Co. in New York City in 1999 and Catalyst Arts, London in 2000.

Larry Johnson’s Untitled (L+R), 2020 is a diptych made in 2020 for Made in LA and presented at the Hammer Museum. The photographs are taken from original paste-ups shown at our space in MacArthur Park in 2020. In them we see the perspective of the viewer’s or artist ́s own hands in coded palmistry. On the left hand, we read the lines through names of classic entertainment characters, movies, writers and gay cult icons. On the right hand Larry pastes names of four decades of cult gay porn actors, porn writers, porn studios and hard core gay porn websites.

Art Club 2000’s SoHo So Long, 1996 was originally shown at American Fine Arts, Co. in 1996. The work is a critical reflection on gentrification and the material conditions that led to the migration of galleries from the increasingly commercial SoHo to the vast and vacant garages of the purportedly ‘untapped’ Chelsea. The core project was a series of extensive interviews with notable New York gallerists, critics, and collectors who were contemplating this relocation of the art world’s then-current center to a new gallery district in a remote neighborhood.

La Misión

…And then was the Verb
Boiling from these hands;
Coffins wide open
—Dropping off feast, fright—,
Eternally committed to
Felony.
Gods as guts and Goals
Hunted by the law of the Great Number;
Innocent cruelty dispossessed from
Joker, Pythia, Messiah in the name of
Kratos.
Law nor number:
Mystery!
Night in eye. Homer’s watery humor covered in waterfalls;
Ocular obsolescence shows the face of sigh(t).
Potential encounters where answer is perpetually
Question.
Ruins nourished by the ones to be killed—Beauties worthy of
Sacrifice.
Time is the flagellum of presence.
Utilitarianism: chimera that ignores our ash destiny. We are
Vehicles seeking a different return of the same
World.
X spins 45°. Three nailed sticks…
Yawn of years goes by—new?
Zero.

Gaga is pleased to present La Misión, the second exhibition of Karla Kaplun (b. Querétaro, México, 1993) with Gaga and her first in the United States, marking the opening of our new shared space in Los Angeles.

The show consists of an altarpiece (retablo in Spanish) composed of 15 paintings the artist began in 2020. The starting point was the idea of the Ark, the Plague, God’s wrath and the need to evacuate our contemporary world: And God told Noah, “I have determined to make an end of all flesh, for the earth is filled with violence through them. Behold, I will destroy them with the earth.” (Genesis 6:13) As it goes, God then told Noah to build an Ark divided into three levels which we see represented in the installation. The work depicts images of various animals, the figure of Christ, and members of the artist’s immediate community suspended in a baroque tableaux chronicling the birth of a new world, the death of an old one, and all its attendant violence. The title of the exhibition evokes the concept of a task or duty–a mission or a commission. What does it mean to produce a work, to be filled with purpose, to act on One’s will, or the will of God?