The show will transform 40,000 square feet of corporate, under-construction space in Midtown into a sprawling exhibition. The curators’ choice of a gutted, raw space expresses the will of an artist community to reclaim agency in a landscape where independent creative space is vanishing at speed.

With R U STILL PAINTING???, FALCON carries onward the spirit and playfulness of New York’s early 2000’s art scene. 

R U STILL PAINTING??? is not a question posed to the artists, but a provocation drawn from online culture both a meme and an ironic response to a digital visual world where the human hand is allegedly no longer required to generate multiple imaginaries.

This survey celebrates the imperfect nature of the physical — painting that bleeds and groans, stumbles and laughs as it fractures imagery into unexpected forms. These canvases reclaim inconsistency as a virtue, discovering meaning through the push and pull of physical gesture.

Far from being a relic of history, painting reemerges here with evolving urgency: in a disembodied age, paint becomes a declaration of the artist’s embodied presence.

R U STILL PAINTING??? feels like a wink to the 2000s DIY scene loft shows, warehouse pop-ups, and artist-run galleries like Reena Spaulings, where artists curated other artists. What did these offer that’s missing in today’s art world?

Freedom. It’s as simple as that. The high cost of running galleries, a speculation-led behavior of certain collectors and a cultural atmosphere that flinches at anything too raw or provocative all of that has tightened the screws on the creative process. It’s interrupted the flow of ideas. Back in the late ’90s and early 2000s, artists had the space to provoke and to provoke themselves. To tear things down, rebuild, and circulate uncomfortable truths. There was a counterculture sharp, layered, intellectually alive moving alongside but apart from the mainstream. I remember the hack meetings in Italian squats in the early 2000s. People were building blockchain networks and talking about bitcoin before the world had even caught on. Then slowly, the internet swallowed everything remixing, hiding, distorting, separating. We entered the age of post-truth, where true, almost true, and false all blur together. We’re in a war now a war between artists, between storytellers, between narratives. A war where facts don’t really matter it’s events that carry meaning. The art world is tangled in this foggy, accelerated climate and it suffers, like so many other industries. So something as simple as taking back a space, reclaiming control, playing together again as artists, breaking rules to invent new ones, going too far, having fun… becomes both a survival tactic and an act of resistance. This exhibition like others before it speaks to a shared desire among the artists to return to something real. To community. To friendship.

The title’s riff on meme language lands like a dare, a shrug, and a shout. What was the inspiration behind it? Who are you really asking the question to?

To me, the question isn’t directed at the artists in the show. We imagined it coming at us from visual culture itself. From a community of image-thinkers raised on moving images, who now look at art like a distracted tourist glancing at an iguana after landing in Brazil. It’s not about us versus the internet. We’re in it all the way. Personally, I shower on Reddit. But just like you can’t lie to a streetwise dealer without getting caught, some of the art world’s foggy logic doesn’t quite fly on the internet. Today’s artist knows there’s no longer an avant-garde except maybe the hive-mind… But the artist moves at a different rhythm. They observe, slow things down, distill, interpret, give form to what’s blurry. It’s an exchange. Maybe unequal, but necessary. In the past, the artist looked at the web like a thief peeking through a window.
Today, the artist is part of that same community, sharing its strategies and creative processes. And when pushed to the edge, both artists and online communities turn to humor as a form of resistance.

While the show may be “non-rational” and “arbitrary,” you’ve assembled a formidable list of 40+ artists across generations, schools, and insider-outsider lines. What’s the logic hidden inside your anti-logic?

Rather than logic, I’d talk about keyframes pivotal moments that gave shape to this flamboyant exhibition. The first keyframe is simple: friendship. This whole process began with the most complex, elusive relationship of all friendship.
When four friends decide to do something together, they become dangerous figuratively speaking. They become effective. It becomes a game, but also an adventure. A real group of friends is willing to go all in, even without any guarantee of success. They move on trust alone. Why? Why not. Friendship isn’t bound by time. It cuts across years of silence, like butter. How do I know? We kicked this show off by picking up the phone and calling artists who we were in dialogue wit people we once shared real moments of life with. It felt like no time had passed. Like we’d spoken just the day before.
That’s a kind of value you can’t buy maybe the only real, unmarketable currency in the art world. No one can come between two people who are real friends From there, it snowballed. Friends called more friends. We found ourselves around dinner tables, again and again eating, drinking, dreaming. The show came out of that. Organically. Like mushrooms growing overnight. Of course, that wasn’t the only logic. Once we had a foundation of works we loved, we reached out to others new artists, new friends. And by then, it was easy. You could feel it was already happening. People joined with enthusiasm.

Why Midtown? What does it mean to activate this raw, commercial space and corporate vacancy not just in square footage, but as a site of meaning?

It means we’re in business now any quality empty space in this city is “at risk,” while the falcon hovers above Manhattan. Why Midtown? For the last 20 years, I saw Midtown as a ruin of modernity to borrow Marc Augé’s words, a non-place. Like an unfinished or abandoned structure where you expect weeds to take over. But then came the pandemic. When it felt like the whole city might collapse, Midtown showed resilience.Today, there are real opportunities opening up in Midtown. In a good way, it’s like a zombie that just won’t die no matter how many times you shoot at him. It’s become our favorite neighborhood in New York. In this city, space is power, and Midtown has space and that means opportunity for art and creativity. With remote work becoming the norm and a financial crisis looming, Midtown is the place to hide out and fight back. It’s old school and in this context, that means wise. This amazing venue came from a meeting with an inspired landlord he’s older, but sharp like a TikTok trend. We shared our vision, and the rest unfolded like a chain reaction. A festive one.

In a moment when gallery real estate is shrinking and the art world feels gridlocked, what does this show resist, and what futures does it open up?

Oh, don’t worry it’s just a feeling. Everything’s going to be fine. Some greedy people will fall. Others will find friends and community again and start sharing. I’m optimistic about the future not politically (I’m no expert there), but artistically. I feel the art world will come back together. It just makes sense the same way New York came together during the pandemic, during the blackout, during 9/11… New Yorkers and the art world are survivors. We might forget sometimes, but we know how to fight. We’ve tasted freedom at least once.
As Sun Tzu says: “All warfare is based on deception.” The art world must learn again how to surprise at least itself to disorient, to never be where it’s expected, to turn weakness into strength, to shift course suddenly. That’s creative strategy.