by Alex Wells
Claire Colette has a show at Night Gallery called Shoot Forth Thunder. I see no clear reason for it. For the show itself or the title. There’s no shooting forth here of thunder or otherwise. What are they? They are gridded-looking things like tablecloths like there’s a pattern and then a smeary thing across them. Sometimes the grid looks more like a tablecloth and sometimes a little less and sometimes the smeary things are just a smeary line and sometimes there’s more smearing.
Why is this occurring in 2025—in one of Los Angeles’ notable avant-garde spaces? Surely, by sheer combinatoric energy, paintings exactly like this have been made in every country where they’ve heard of abstract painting for 60 years? With every ounce of sincerity this critic can muster: What excites anyone—very much the artist included—in making rudimentary post-AbEx gestures like this yet again?
Sure, the Modernist clarity of the grid is here interrupted by the intrusion of the raw gesture—Janine Antoni made Gnaw in 1992 and even then it was mostly fun because chocolate was involved. Who on the increasingly-ungreen-Earth has any need of this gesture to be made yet again only less so? I am asking. While I suppose it is possible that the demise of Bed, Bath and Beyond in 2023 released some strata of match-the-couch painters out into the contemporary art scene, this doesn’t explain why anyone capable of asking five or six figures a piece would agree to show them. This is like a record label deciding to devote their entire marketing budget to a door chime. Who is this Claire Colette? Does she have drugs?
I am sure there are rooms that would be ably tied together by a big piece of graph paper with a smeary gash across it but it is very difficult to imagine a human being looking at one on purpose for any length of time and deriving any part of a life worth having from it. I would believe you if you told me she was an AI. I am trying to understand: The press release says “Metaphorically and mythologically, thunder is the catalyst for transformation and the deliverer of karma from which a subject’s path is irrevocably altered” Can anyone involved in making this press release happen be remotely serious? The gallerist read this, right? Are they not embarrassed? What is going on here? Are we the damned? Are we in a living Hell? Has Trump so completely desolated us as a nation that even our hipster art dealers can imagine nothing but the palest and most reactionary strategies to survive? Who told Claire Colette she had a future in the art business? More darkly: what does it mean for us all if they’re right?
Image: Courtesy Night Gallery