Artforum New York FRIEDRICH PETZEL GALLERY 535-537 West 22nd Street May 22–July 11 Matthew Brannon arranges flat shapes to conjure familiar objects, as though playing with tangrams. A series of semiabstract prints at the rear of his latest exhibition appears to document his experiments with drawing in two dimensions. But these works are an exception. The generous amount of text in most of these letterpress prints marks a slow public metamorphosis from artist to novelist, and, for Brannon, literary concerns ultimately trump formal ones. Flatness is more than a condition imposed by the medium; it is a trope for the flimsy skins of personality that the characters of his elliptical vignettes sometimes let slip or that Brannon, as the author, withdraws to expose their anxieties. The images these stories accompany are Chelsea-approved signs of hipness, like designer footwear and sushi. Brannon divides them from snippets of narrative with plenty of blank space. The paper’s white looks whiter against the colored boards the prints are installed on, and its flat, bright void suggests a suffocating isolation, exacerbated by lines like: “I’m rotting from the inside out. I know it’s over. The lights are on. The audience has left.” Several purple patches lurk in the margins of this exhibition: white-noise generators; the aforementioned text-free prints; an out-of-reach shelf stocked with copies of Brannon’s latest novella, Rat, which no one is allowed to read; blocks of dark enamel paint applied directly to the gallery’s walls; and a pencil scribble that, really, a four-year-old could have drawn. The hermetic secrecy of these pieces raises associations with the privacy of the creative process, and the apprehensions of artmaking become a foil for the social ones Brannon writes about. Loose Change, a stray print best visible on exiting the gallery, has a fictional artist describing an encounter with a critic, who slams his show (which, incidentally, sounds a bit like Brannon’s), calling it, among other things, “embarrassingly self-conscious.” His tirade elicits the artist’s acid response: “Who asked you?” But in “The Question Is a Compliment” and its world of fragile loneliness, any expression of interest is a hand extended across a chasm and should be accepted with gratitude. --Brian Droitcour New York Times The Question Is a Compliment Friedrich Petzel 537 West 22nd Street , Chelsea Successful artists who never quite severed their ties to the commercial sphere — Andy Warhol, Richard Prince — are the model for Matthew Brannon . Using letterpress, silk-screens and other commercial printing methods, Mr. Brannon elevates graphic design to the level of text-based contemporary art (or is it the other way around?). He has also organized a literary-inspired group exhibition at Casey Kaplan, “Not So Subtle Subtitle,” opening on Thursday. The bulk of the show at Petzel consists of a series of letterpress prints of women’s high-heel shoes, worthy of Carrie Bradshaw’s walk-in closet. These cheerful images are accompanied by the bitter and frustrated ruminations of various characters: “an effete young man, a handsome yet weary detective addicted to painkillers, a group of art enthusiasts, several irresponsible waiters, two bookish hairdressers, a nympho florist, a frustrated critic, a tireless reporter.” Lest the prints seem too novelistic, Mr. Brannon displays them on handmade rigs of fiberboard, oak veneer and stainless steel. He also makes subtle sculptural and architectural interventions throughout the gallery. In the front hall he has suspended a “light bulb” (actually a polystyrene carving) from a wooden drop ceiling. He has also placed white-noise machines around the gallery and installed a small bookshelf high on the wall. Like many young artists, Mr. Brannon sometimes relies too much on titles, news releases and other contextualizers. In the back gallery, a series of silk-screens on newsprint depict colorful discs (said to represent pornographic DVDs, but otherwise innocuous). Mr. Brannon’s texts tend to regurgitate urban clichés, just as his images recycle midcentury design. The sum of these parts, however, speaks directly and authentically to the aspirations and anxieties of young, creative New Yorkers. --Karen Rosenberg