My Crack House is Better than Yours

My Crack House is Better than Yours

Finn Massie

Solo show

24.01.-30.04.2025

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Finn Massie’s new paintings are oversaturated with signs and figures. On one canvas, a maels-

trom of topsy-turvy wild horses, smiling cartoony dog faces, checkered patterns, chains, cathe-

dral windows, painterly abstract marks, and anthropomorphized animals dressed in medieval

garb, all scream for our attention. Foreground and background are indistinguishable, as if each

of his motif was shoving the others to get up front. It’s impossible to tell whether the work has

been painted in the same orientation in which it hangs, and one assumes it might have been up-

turned many times during its making. With some parts drawn, briskly outlined, and other painted,

saturated with DayGlo and watery pastel hues, it seems like the only thing holding all those

disparate elements together is their kinetic energy and speed of execution. .

These paintings dissolve the enmity between two traditionally opposed regimens of modern art

making: the improvised and the predetermined. The precursor of this reconciliation might have

been Sigmar Polke, who in the 1960s incorporated ready-made images culled from vernacular

culture into a highly personal and expressive alchemical process. In the 1980s, artists such as

Mike Kelley or Martin Kippenberger, sharpened this integration into an anti-authoritarian pos-

ture: culture traverses us, shapes our mind’s eye; working through its detritus by way of impulses

will unearth and disrupt the shortcomings and perversions of our moral judgments. Four decades

later, as these ideologically motivated aesthetic strategies naturally academized themselves

and, more importantly, as any shared cultural agora has splintered into fiefdoms strewn across

the media field, what remains is a treasure trove of formal processes that continue to be mined

to great effect by successive generations of artists.

Whether they originate from the “high” spheres of art history or the “low” ones of the entertain-

ment industry (here Franz Marc’s horseys, there your phone’s emoji), all of Finn Massie’s source

materials are reduced to adolescent doodles. Their formal treatment makes them indistingui-

shable from the signs and figures the artist designs himself, although “design” might be too

deliberate of an action to describe the casualness of their execution. Resolutely resistant to any

narrative reading, these works are clearly paintings-as-paintings, and invites us to look at them

at as two-dimensional funfair rides. Yet, it would be a mistake to infer that all these motifs are

merely the building blocks of essentially formalist compositions. The anthropomorphized ani-

mal faces that populate each and every one of these works are not simply jubilantly grinning to

themselves and each other on the picture plane. They are also aggressively grinning at you.

Working large, Finn Massie’s paintings blur our typologies of gesture and format: what looks

like a phone doodle becomes a monument which, conversely, is reduced to a graffiti. The visual

maelstrom at play is first and foremost a cerebral point of view. Hung very close to each other

and covering all windows, the paintings’ installation becomes an immersive experience only if

one agrees to partake in it. Like accepting to chew on multiple Warheads, these extreme sour

candies kids dare each other to eat on the playground.

KISSED THEN BURNED

anne@kissedthenburned.com

www.kissedthenburnned.com

📍 KISSED THEN BURNED, Geneva

🗓 24.01 – 30.04.2025

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Fabrice Stroun

FinnMassie KissedThenBurned ContemporaryArt ArtExhibition GenevaArt Painting VisualCulture SoloShow ArtGallery ModernArt