Redundant Beach Fine Art

 

Valery Kessler – 8 yachts in nein acht (Opening September 12, 2025) 

 

In 1977 the German artist Martin Kippenberger went to Florence, Italy to become an actor. When that dream failed, he began to paint. The works that came from that trip rebuffed the heavy German modernism of the moment, exemplified by Gerhard Richter’s 48 portraits, which had been shown five years prior at the 1972 Venice Biennale. “The [Kippenberger] paintings look like bad Richters,” Chris Reitz notes. But they were also keeping with times, updating German painting to be “part of the labor and leisure of contemporary West German life.”[1]

 

In the summer of 2024, the 33-year-old American artist Val Kessler arrived in Florence to recreate Kippenberger’s trip. Kessler was also trying to be an actor of sorts—performing the life of his idol. Using a handheld camera, he snapped photographs that he would later paint, just as Kippenberger did. Recreating Kippenberger’s trip gave him an odd feeling that he was a joke. He wondered if that was how Kippenberger felt too. The narratives written about Kippenberger’s time in Florence, he thought, likely do not match the reality, because art history is always slanted towards the critic. The nineties in Italy were not the sixties. It wasn’t a Pasolini movie then either.  

 

He soon grew bored of painting daily life and began to take pictures of boats. He became fixated on yachts, coming to view them as an elementary artform that would make his reputation—like Warhol’s banana or Kippenberger’s egg—with “untapped potential. For good? Perhaps. For reality, it is certain!” [2] Warhol’s banana and Kippenberger’s egg were quotidian objects. But the yacht? Not even a real category of boat. Its characteristics are that it is large and expensive. It is a sign for unattainability, and in that it is the antithesis of the quotidian object.

 

Kessler began referring to his own paintings as yachts. “I’m yachting today,” he would say, when he was going to his studio. Somewhere in painting this exhibition, Kessler abandoned painting his trip to Italy and instead chose to focus almost exclusively on a YouTube viral video titled “Seven Person Speed Boat SMASH - crazy.” In the clip, we see a group of vacationers enjoying a boat day on the lake. The boat is hurtling over choppy water. After a few seconds of driving, they hit some even rougher patches but no one seems bothered. The passengers keep smiling and the driver keeps punching the accelerator. This proves to be a mistake. They hit a large wave that sends everyone flying around the boat like ragdolls. The driver, who had been violently slammed to the deck, audibly groans out of frame. Women in bikinis stand up soaked and stunned. The footage stops.

 

Kessler deeply identified with this video, believing it emblematized the experience of the yacht and of his relationship to his predecessors. He dreamed of taking over America and Europe on his yachts, as the new shape of the readymade and of post-conceptual painting. The video taught him that “bad” painting could only be surpassed by a failure so grand, so extravagant that it consumed the artist, just like the water consumed these boaters, thereby transforming his—and their—failure into a success. Indeed, this accident was certainly a physical failure but it was a viral sensation. All Kessler wanted was to feel that sensation.  

 

It is tempting to view these paintings as yet another instance of deadpan internet painting, that banal genre so common with younger artists. But that could not be further from the truth. Kessler’s interest with the video is in how it represents an accelerating escape from representation, copyright, and the stifling laws of identity—in painting, geopolitics, and life.  

 

Oddly, Kessler has decided to pair his paintings with large floating billboards that steal excerpts from an article I (Max Lee, the author) am writing about Kessler’s practice. I have no comment on this choice.

 

 

                                                                                    —Max Lee

 

[1] Chris Reitz, Martin Kippenberger: Everything is Everywhere, 37, MIT Press, 2023.

[2] Letters dated 04/24/24 and 05/28/24. Information about Kessler’s trip comes from letters to his parents in Nevada and notes jotted in 4x6 notebooks.