This week, reviews of Phyllida Barlow at Hauser & Wirth, Aryo Toh Djojo at Sow & Tailor, and more.
Daisuke Fukunaga depicts Japanese workers as tired but happy. Are they, really? | Jennifer Remenchik The characters of Daisuke Fukunaga’s Beautiful Work, on view at Nonaka-Hill, occupy a unique and strange liminal space between work and sleep. Throughout the exhibition, Fukunaga keeps a seemingly simple concept — pleasant paintings of workers — remarkably unexpected. In these paintings, the worker appears solitary, and, with a few exceptions, entirely alone on the picture plane. While this setup could easily be depicted as lonely or sad, somehow Fukunaga manages more emotional complexity than that, keeping them in a space more akin to the dreamy. In attempting to convey atrocities that confound language, artist Phyllida Barlow comes up against a paradox with no easy resolution. | Natalie Haddad Aryo Toh Djojo’s paintings capture the jarring moment of looking at a familiar photograph, only to notice something slightly amiss. | Jeanha Park Phil Peters, “Schematics 3” (2022), Drafting vellum, drafting film, yellow trace, ink, graphite, marker, colored pencil, and tape, 24 x 24 inches (photo by Paul Salveson, courtesy Canary Test) |