Marking yet another relocation for this Chelsea touchstone (next door to its previous digs), the aptly titled “Movement in Three Parts” brings downtown veteran John Giorno together with two relative newcomers, Oscar Murillo and Brie Ruais. The trio share a predilection for funneling performance into painting, and live actions by Giorno and Murillo are scheduled as part of the show. Giorno’s small but punchy square canvases and drawings use a bold typographic format, reminiscent of iconoclastic British fashion designer Katharine Hamnett’s sloganeering ’80s T-shirts, to spell out two downbeat mottoes: i want it to rain for the rest of my life and don’t wait for anything. These appear in a variety of colors, and are scattered around the gallery like depressive Post-it notes.
Much larger—and messier—are Murillo’s grungily expressive unstretched canvases, Skinny Latte and Espresso; a Sheetrock panel titled Work! (cheekily installed as an office wall); and a cluster of posters in the window called Untitled. All were made on location, using materials from—and incorporating images of—previous works. They record a daily process of distilling everyday routine and personal history into energized, if stylistically familiar, semiabstractions. Ruais also treats the gallery as a studio and stage, spreading the equivalent of her own weight in clay into a flattened splotch on the wall, as if trying to patch up a calamitous leak. Whether using words or bodily force, all three artists here forge heedlessly ahead.—Michael Wilson