Christopher Wool’s retrospective See Stop Run is located on the 19th floor of 101 Greenwich Street above a corporate lobby with a Rentbrella stand. After passing through elevators with stock updates ticking across video screens, you emerge on a long-empty floor to find a selection of the artist’s work over the last decade.
Surrealism having gone beyond itself has encountered a form of unevenness, an impalpable flowing into a wider arc as utopian sigil. The higher state seems at present to endemically invoke rise into a celestial spectrum. Not as brazen subscription to prior tenet, but tenet as mantric higher maze.
When Richard Scott Larson was twelve going on thirteen, he started having a recurring nightmare of travelling a hallway full of dangerous, distorted characters toward a door slightly ajar, with someone hidden just behind it in the shadows. To anyone versed in dream language, The Long Hallway will be discomfitingly familiar, yet it is impossible to prepare for the way that Larson describes, in this vivid and cinematic memoir debut, the summer that defined his life.
The figures in Graham Little’s works on paper—sixteen of which are spread across four rooms at the FLAG Art Foundation—all appear to be posing in service of an external gaze, even those who are engrossed in reading, stretching, and pouring tea.
The series is both arachnean and cartographic, with Wesenberg’s additive-and-subtractive practice of drilling and weaving the linen canvas complicating the adage that “painting is essentially line and color”.