Whitehot Magazine
May 2025
"The Best Art In The World"
"The Best Art In The World"
May 2025
Weekend Reviews: Carolyn Case at Asya Geisberg, Jeff Overlie at Marc Straus, Video Game Aesthetics at The Hole, and more
By LIAM OTERO April 29, 2025
1. Carolyn Case: Wild Domestic at Asya Geisberg Gallery, Tribeca (on view through May 10)
Carolyn Case with her work, Spring Rush, 2025, oil on canvas.
Slice of life subjects are treated in an entirely novel way through the seemingly abstract paintings of Carolyn Case in her fourth exhibition with Asya Geisberg Gallery. When studying her large-scale work, one will be greeted by a cornucopia of innumerable gestural brushstrokes - possibly in the hundreds - of varying shades, widths, and patterns within a single canvas. However, these are really a conceptual veneer for a world of figurative elements that have been recontextualized from their original place - Case’s home. The title “Wild Domestic” is indicative of the artist’s intent to synthesize “mess, uncertainty, beauty, and order” from her surroundings as a statement on how creativity and imagination are not only inextricably connected to home, but also elevate one’s perception of the ordinary into something far more enchanting. In Blue Spatula (2024), a purplish-blue spatula glides in space whilst surrounded by a vortex of curvaceously bent forms that resemble ladles, straws, and other utensils. Meanwhile, the white squared tiles of linoleum flooring towards the lower left reinforce the recognizability of a kitchen. Any other figurative characteristics are deliberately enmeshed within, among, and around smears of layered paint, isolated strokes, playful curlicues, and other dynamic forms. One minute you might guess that a blue-bordered golden shape is a lemon, and the next you spot what appears to be a watermelon slice distinguished by its reddened appearance and pockmarked seeds floating by possibly a clear blue sky. The near recognizability of forms with which we may associate in our own domesticity feels like a wondrous mix of Ellsworth Kelly’s subtle nods to representing nature through abstraction and Willem de Kooning’s colorfully deconstructed compositions.
Carolyn Case, Blue Spatula, 2024, oil on canvas.
Carolyn Case, Blue Shower, 2025, chalk pastel on pastel card with artist frame, ceramic stoneware, and glaze.
In addition to these large canvases, Case’s exhibition includes a series of smaller paintings framed by an ostentatious ceramic border that is equally rich with abstracted and figurative elements as the composition contained within.
During a second trip to this exhibition, I had the honor of meeting Case and she graciously explained how quotidian sights - a dish rack, kitchen counter, to-do list, etc. - could take on new formal meaning and expression in her paintings. We wound up spending a great deal of time pinpointing specific objects among the pleasing jumble of abstract gestures as if we were partaking in a game of I Spy!
2. Jeff Overlie - Glitch://Life at Marc Straus Gallery, Lower East Side / Chinatown
Installation view of Jeff Overlie - Glitch://Life at Marc Straus Gallery
Jeff Overlie’s first-ever solo exhibition at Marc Straus Gallery is a tour de force in analyzing the visual language of abstract painting and sculpture. This two-floored exhibition features two series of paintings and two series of sculptures undertaken by Overlie. Blackberry Horizons merges the aesthetics of cellphone glitches with minimalist abstraction on a grand scale. For this work, Overlie found beauty in the seemingly flawed aesthetics of an old Blackberry device from 15 years ago. After enlarging images of glitches, he painstakingly replicated these tech flaws into painterly form. Thin rectangular strips of color purposefully “disrupt” compositions that are otherwise largely occupied by a flat plane of color. A cacophonous fragmentation of flashing lights, distorted pixels, and flickering data symbols steal the scene and accurately resemble a real glitch one encounters on a faulty phone or computer. Unlike the dreaded associations we have of glitches as harbingers of a device on the fritz, Overlie’s balanced compositions of textural solidity and patterned hues “operates” perfectly well.
Installation view of Jeff Overlie - Glitch://Life at Marc Straus Gallery
In a similar vein, Overlie’s Block Theory paintings explore how limited palettes of 5 to 8 colored rectangles and squares can produce formal harmony within a painting. What an injustice for Josef Albers to not be alive today, for this giant of color theory would have had a field day visiting Overlie’s exhibition, especially seeing how the Block Theory section comes to a magnificent curatorial crescendo in a room featuring 9 of the paintings hung in a 3x3 format with two clerestory windows and a skylight that bring in the sun's rays!
Installation view of Jeff Overlie - Glitch://Life at Marc Straus Gallery
As for the sculptural end of the exhibition, Overlie’s stainless steel sculptures are interspersed throughout the gallery in tandem with the aforementioned paintings. The Protein Structure series, much like Blackberry Horizons, reveals the artist’s interest in the more scientific aspects of life as those sculptures are representative of the molecular models used to visualize DNA, RNA, and protein. The latter series, 6061T Aluminum, is the sculptural complement to Block Theory as Overlie probes three-dimensional cohesion in aluminum according to balanced edges, surfacing, and reflectiveness - these not only work well on their own, but in conjunction with their display alongside Overlie’s equally meticulous paintings.
3. LFG (Let’s Fucking Go) at The Hole, Tribeca (on view through May 24)
Benzimienny, Thora, 2021, oil on canvas, and Swamp Herb (pl. Bagienne Ziele), 2020, oil paint on wood panels in 3 pieces.
As someone who grew up with video games (and later appreciated them as an art form), I was immensely pleased with The Hole’s current exhibition, LFG, which brings the aesthetics of video games into the arena of the fine arts. The press release makes a convincing case for the primacy of video games’ presence in contemporary life surpassing social media, film, and television. This is literally the 21st Century take on paragone, an Italian Renaissance idea that ascertained which modes of creative expression were more important between painting, poetry, architecture, and sculpture. Looking at it through today’s lens, LFG demonstrates how video game aesthetics applied in artistic mediums like painting, sculpture, and installation can effectively attract viewers’ attention in ways comparable to or even greater than passive television binging or social media doomscrolling.
Mashine, Pwease, Just One Little Iceberg, 2025, acrylic on canvas.
For this group exhibition, one need not be an avid gamer nor familiar with specific gaming lingo to appreciate how each artist engages with the visual vocabulary of video games - in many ways, these have become the iconography of today. A few special mentions from this exhibition: Bezimienny’s Thora (2021) is a painterly recreation of late-1990s / early-2000s action-adventure graphics while three painted sculptures, the Swamp Herb (pl. Bagienne Ziele) (2020), are situated in front of the work as if to simulate being in a virtual world (the early Elder Scrolls games sprung to mind); Mashine’s Pwease, Just One Little Iceberg (2025) is a depiction of the hilarious internet meme of Vice President JD Vance’s overly distorted face placed over the body of Pikachu from the Pokemon franchise; Gao Hang’s sculptural Art for Healing Projects I (2022) brings the medkit, universal symbol of healing across thousands of video games, into the real world; Luke Murphy’s LED matrix panels emit highly saturated colorful lights that materialize in loosened grid frameworks (Tetris, anyone?); and Kévin Bray’s 4 Exs (Écho des Luttes et des Conquêtes) (2023) combines physical mass, sound, and video projection in which the image of a sword-wielding character is played over a 3D-printed sculpture.
Kévin Bray’s 4 Exs (Écho des Luttes et des Conquêtes), 2023, 3D print white pla, video projection, sound.
Depending on your preference for how you gear up for an exhibition, I highly recommend reading the curatorial statement - either before or after - as curator Kathy Grayson’s writing is a brilliant fusion of ascerbic wit, nostalgic musings, and academic assessment on the enormous cultural weight of video games and society’s relationships with them.
4. Take it home, for (___) shall not repeat the error. [Manhattan Project] at apexart, Tribeca (on view through May 24)
Kei Ito, Eye Who Witnessed, 2020 - 2021, unique c-print photograms (historical archive, sunlight, artist's breath), wooden frame, installation.
apexart’s group exhibition is a sobering reflection on the legacies of the Manhattan Project and the subsequent bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the US at the end of the Second World War. Though this exhibition is, in part, a contemporary interrogation of the militaristic consequences of the bombings in August 1945, it is equally committed to voicing concerns on the continued existence of nuclear weapons almost 80 years later. The exhibition’s title derives from an epitaph at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park that implores current and future generations to ensure history is not repeated.
Layla Yamamoto, A girl in Los Alamos, 2019, acrylic on canvas.
Four artists - three of whom are Japanese, and one is from the Democratic Republic of the Congo - each assess the Manhattan Project from different angles and mediums. Sixte Kakinda’s screen projections with accompanying narration discuss the oft-neglected history of the Congo’s role in the Manhattan Project as uranium was extracted from the country’s coal mines to be used for the atom bomb (and the acquisition of this metal also led to the infection of many Congolese miners). Hiroshima native Souya Hanada (who is also the curator of this exhibition) vies for an olfactory method in which bitter scents permeate the space and attach themselves to viewers - a stark reminder of how atomic radiation’s formlessness maintains a stranglehold on everything it surrounds. Japanese-American artist Kei Ito’s practice is heavily informed by their status as the grandchild of a hibakusha (atomic bomb survivor) as he inundates an entire wall with a photo-installation featuring close-ups of bombing victims’ eyes awash in an ominous glow of red, orange, and yellow - in one sense, it feels as though we are seeing each victim’s final moment frozen in time when the bomb dropped, or alternatively, some kind of scanning tracker of each person’s radiation exposure. And lastly, Layla Yamamoto’s acrylic paintings scrutinize the role of nuclear power in Japan-US relations since 1945, from the ecological fallout of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011 to Los Alamos’s role as a site for creating weapons of mass destruction. WM
