Camille Lütjens, Lou-Anna Ulloa del Rio, Jordan Selophane, Etienne EiseleNever Forever( super mega top! )At dinner, after a concert, an exhibition, a quiet day at work, friends laughingA silly video on someone’s phoneyou take a photo of a stray object on the table or lurking in the background, a ponytail or crumpled paper, a pizza stool in legs up the wall repose. That stray symbol becomes a forgotten photo; meanwhile, you make others:photos, emails, notes. Then, at a nonspecific later date, in search of new material, a fresh referent that will serve to tracea lingering concernIt resurfaces. Through a rhythm known to you, with whatever tools you have for mediation, the lost photo of the absent thing becomes a found paintingor perhaps not a painting at all but a drawing a cast a shelf full of sculptureCopy, rinse, repeat and the ensuing artifact must become its own photo, and also a portfolio, an application; under the right sign, blessed by the correct gods, maybe even a show.At the very least, it will figure in an installation shot, in a now of never-forever it will stand for something—applications and ID cards, a chapter in a life, train tickets in far-off cities,real tears, thoughts over-thought, and other valences of home.Like a favorite story, imbued with infinite potential for reinvention, for a neat riff (yours?), such a description of creative practice emerging from, and in response to, our image and information saturated media environment is familiar, even banal. Kind of obvious, very human. We understand it, too, as an explicit gesture toward the human, as modeling a practice of semiotic and processual intimacy within a circular apparatus, spooning out a soupçon of personal feeling from a pictographic perpetual stew. That soup has become ladle, that it is our phones that now tell us what we want to show, instantiates another phase of technological determinism pronounced enough to be put to use (Nam Jun Paik: “to hate it properly”). So trigger and method in artistic process are inseparable from their issuing mechanism…so what! Algorithms construct whole mnemosynes that we call our own, since it was ‘we’ (loose, complex ‘we’) who made the algorithms, as Michael Sanchez observed, writing about avatars as actors in an essay on Contemporary Art Daily syndrome some fifteen years ago. Hello dankness ‘Paul’ ‘Virilio’. Everything measured up against everything else. As in,see something                                             say “it cute”no, no, it about cute             wincing                 conspiratorial smilesthought-bubble floating off above our heads                    skywritesSianne Ngai, Sanrio sponsorships, valleys canny but unhappy, so many gradations of gimmickand the object of those connections, the locus of consideration that is the artwork, must pop those gummed up meanings and wear them like a Colen or wad them in the trash.When pathways of association take center stage in a hyper-retinal experience, undergoing costume changes at rapid pace, what is staked, then, by slow, still, enduringly material, artworks? That question is older than its typically zillenial respondents, simultaneously too big and petit trope. Subject to all that (fast capital, soft power, LED light-bulbs), mindful of precedents (Majerus, Kelley) and scope (gahhhhh), young artists help our bodiless sociocultural consciousness keep score. Through a small-batch maker’s mark approach, they trade melancholic ‘contending’ for anxious nuance, a cohering of contradictions, a breaking up of cycles through dramaturgies of fraught enthusiasm—exultations of super, mega, top.In Etienne Eisele’s sculptural practice, souvenirs of commercial rhetoric reappear as spatial saboteurs. Luschen I is a mirrored plaque installed at the gallery entrance, scrawled ‘Good Luck!’ in a bright, reflective orange. A crafty double fallacy, Eisele’s work is at once caustic and affecting, made deep by a claim to being not that deep at all. Luschen I strains our gaze upwards, introducing the exhibition through the prism of our own faces shining in its selfie-ready gloss, as cold words and warmly shaded content loom with no clear direction, nor director. Evasiveness—oblique displacement—proves hella helpful to asserting personal value at the fringes of identification. The more quotidian, the more discursive: Lou-Anna Ulloa del Rio’s Porcelaine comprises an enlarged silver clip propping up a tall scrim of tracing paper. A column of white lies, Porcelaine’s metal fastener is actually painted wood, its tissue skirt shaped to seem as sturdy as a curtain. These uncertain illusions, skeptical of their own sources, are guided by an impulse less to pull one over than to pull, to tug at a corner of private imagination, verifying that it holds, a careful test of depth perception.That protective slyness is elaborated by Camille Lütjens in a painting idiom of mixed metaphors: her Clumsy Choreography suggests a map textured by a crinkly black river and sectioned with a shiny blue bow; in the more ominously titled Candy Coercion (2022), icons of digital engagement and physical fact are interjected for tension, in comparing how hard it is to make a ‘move,’ any move, on either turf. Analysis paralysis is on par with medium and moment; not even reversions to nature, with Choreography’s camouflage-style ground and a frosty cloud in Coercion, allow for breathing room between layers, pasteurized by screen-fleek-realness mode. Jordan Selophane’s drawings pursue a similar hall of mirrors effect in a more liberated tone, presenting axonometric views of categorically stuffy Wunderkammer gone sketchy, reclaimed as comic and playful—exaggerated, therefore ‘girl’. These works (Where are they?, Another room) are populated by lips and stars, keyholes and frames, motifs isolated for elusive flavor and a light chew. Deposited in a set of warped architectures, they evoke mobile cubicles imaged like cubicle decor, with the hot colors and confident strokes of Rachel Harrison’s Amy Winehouse multiples, minus any Picasso stencils. Online performance is so micro and refractive, it can’t be intertextual; the histories that fray at Lütjens’ canvases free Selophane to devise new worlds.Folding inwards in spiraling out, artists might render unstable terrain semi-navigable by remaining half-glitched (Lütjens, Eisele) or proudly hermetic (Selophane, Ulloa del Rio). With wrinkles of affinity built into digital being adopted as artistic strategy, then as subject, then as point, perhaps we would wish for a bigger splash, for Gramsci’s “morbid symptoms,” the terrible things that happen between ages, to pass through our premises at the level of the visual. I guess that’s what NFTs were for. Instead, here we have a subtler proposal: borne from a culture stuck in traffic at whatever nebulous junction where ‘foreigners everywhere’ meets core-core and post-post, works that exude a sincere self-sufficiency, a mood of thick narration and also, ‘ain’t reading all that’, because well, you know the vibe, don’t you. Because who is not inclined to chic mythologizing when faced with tough scores. Like all of us, they take up refuge in annotation and encoding, awaiting a next chapter, a new wave of re-collection. To do it again, each time more mega, more super, more top, and in reverse.Moselle KleinerCurated by Gaia del Santo