NAUSEA

Jean-Paul Sartre's first novel Nausea (Penguin Press, 1938) captures something of today, something that Angel, Hayfa, HazzA, Samo, and Sara image out, too: an unease with the current moment; a defamiliarization with even the most banal of everyday things; and that guttural feeling that something's not quite right-but if only I could name it, maybe I could fix it.

Building upon Thaer Select's first show "My Existence, that Absurd Thing" curated by Talal Al Najjar, NAUSEA presents an expanded field of figuration with anthropomorphized physical and psychic landscapes that speak to a distinctly contemporary psychosis.

These painters-all from various comers across the world-offer diverse strategies of representation to advance their own socio-cultural agendas, be they feminist, anti-fascist, spiritual, identitarian, Markedly, all retreat into the sublime through a nostalgia for past aesthetic regimes: 19th century engravings, 1920s French surrealism, 1930s art deco, or 1990s NY/LA DIY. And bodies, bodies, bodies elongated and outstretched, contorted and disgusting, deathconscious and entwined in contemplation, in danse macabre, in violent transformation.

If yesteryear's chimera was a beast with the head of a lion, the belly of a goat and the tail of a serpent, today's monstrosity is humankind: a mensch-maschine composited with computer-aided brainpower, a belly of plastic particulate, and mechanical limbs capped with press-on nail art. You'll see these new chimeras throughout these paintings.

As anthropologist Alexei Yurchak famously once wrote, "Everything was forever, until it was no more." To this, these artists propose a type of anxious oblivion: get cracked, bleed your heart out, and scream until your face distorts itself so unrecognizable, a doppelganger displaces its original so totally that a shadow reality covers all.

-Christopher Joshua Benton