R U STILL PAINTING?? Falcon Art Collective Debuts with a Purpose in Midtown

By JOSH NILAND May 22, 2025

The annual rites of spring in New York (aka Frieze Week) have ushered in the realization of a different sort of renewal staged inside an empty Midtown office building courtesy of Falcon Art Collective’s “arbitrary, non-national, non-rational, unofficial, and incomplete” survey R U STILL PAINTING??, on view until the end of May on the 15th floor of 520 Eighth Avenue.

The inaugural exhibition of the group, which came together around a series of pre-pandemic dinner table conversations, is a paean to the “painter’s painters” and sacrosanct authenticity of the early 2000s art scene that thrived downtown while, further north, the more historic but less glamorized commercial district lingered—a dowdy, inhumane, and largely un-aggrandized district akin to those the French writer Marc Augé defined as non-places and labeled a pernicious characteristic in modernity.

Installation view of R U STILL PAINTING??? , FALCON Art Collective, 520 8th Ave Fl 15, NYC. Open through June 1. Courtesy the artist and FALCON Art Collective
 

In R U STILL PAINTING??, the candidacy of ‘Zombie’-like corporate architecture set adrift by a post-pandemic downturn to address the crisis of scarcity in gallery real estate frames a separate conversation about the reemergence of painting in our disembodied age. That’s the point, Paololuca Barbieri Marchi, Rebecca Reyes Rock, and Marco Boggio Sella explain, and there are other subtenants that explain painting as an anti-digital medium laced into the show’s implication of temporary space visibly more difficult to identify. 

Installation view of R U STILL PAINTING??? , FALCON Art Collective, 520 8th Ave Fl 15, NYC. Open through June 1. Courtesy the artist and FALCON Art Collective

“It took us six years, a whole pandemic, and the insight of an inspired landlord to finally find the first venue,” they explain. “In New York, space is power, and once we found this location, we knew we could start playing. Midtown right now is full of opportunities for those seeking creative spaces. We believe it is the new Brooklyn. We [built] a fluid model. More than disrupting spatial dynamics, we aim to take advantage of them.”

Installation view of R U STILL PAINTING??? , FALCON Art Collective, 520 8th Ave Fl 15, NYC. Open through June 1. Courtesy the artist and FALCON Art Collective

This begins inside a currently under-construction 40,000 square foot portion of a larger Class B commercial structure in the Garment District (just outside the crosshairs of a stalled $7 billion redevelopment the CRE titan Vornado had been pushing until recently for the area around Penn Station). Exactly 400 paintings made by more than 40 artists whose work today attests to this era’s DIY spirit and fragmentary joy interrupt the bare concrete inertness, with many pieces of valid art present to make a virtue of inconsistency and break from the “obsession of labor” that has doomed creative life in the distressed art capital since then. 
 

Installation view of R U STILL PAINTING??? , FALCON Art Collective, 520 8th Ave Fl 15, NYC. Open through June 1. Courtesy the artist and FALCON Art Collective

Marchi is of the Italian collective Alterazioni Video and Sella is a veteran of those remarkably Halcyon early internet days in New York’s artist-run scene, after which the influence of artist-run spaces like Reena Spaulings’ began to wane. Each shares a common interest along with Rock in the creative exploration of capricious space. Robert Storr’s name appears among their figuration-heavy roster. Others worth a note include an example of Austin Lee’s continued experiments with hyperrealist airbrushed painting, Uri Aran’s mixed-media canvases, and two paintings Su Su and Spencer Sweeney made in the past year.

They’re here to tell us “inconsistency is life – nothing in reality is as linear and logical as it appears through office spreadsheets or the bogus projections of financial advisors.” 

 Installation view of R U STILL PAINTING??? , FALCON Art Collective, 520 8th Ave Fl 15, NYC. Open through June 1. Courtesy the artist and FALCON Art Collective

The group’s co-founders couldn’t have been more clear about their intentions to use these displays as a springboard to confront the notion of human capital and power. In the corpses of buildings, the consequences of an economic gestalt which George Bataille called The Accursed Share can be turned around. Untying space from enterprise in order to reclaim the freedom of the human mind becomes a survival tactic as much an act of resistance. 

 

Installation view of R U STILL PAINTING???, FALCON Art Collective, 520 8th Ave Fl 15, NYC. Open through June 1.
Photo: Clarke Leland. Courtesy the artist and FALCON Art Collective"
 

“We have one rule: Just like the Italian rapper Bello Figo, Falcon does not pay rent (No pago affitto). In Falcon, everything we do is a hobby. A hobby, the way we mean it, is an alternative to labor,” the collective leaves us in overture. “You do it with passion – just as any employer would love to see you work – but you also do it with the lightness of a swallow, Don’t waste your life doing things you don’t enjoy, because even if you do make some money, inflation and cost of living drains most of the liquidity. It’s amazing how much fun you can have – and how much money you can make – once you start treating everything like a hobby, unburdened by the outcome.”

R U STILL PAINTING?? is available daily at 520 Eighth Avenue from May 7th through June 10th from 12-6 PM. (Please note: IDs are required to enter the building.)