William Eckhardt Kohler reviews Jennifer Coates: All U Can Eat at Freight + Volume Gallery, New York, on view through April 16, 2017.

Kohler writes: “With wry humor and a sense of the absurd [Coates] finds these mythic energies embedded in some of the most degraded and cast off of places: the toxic and synthetic chemistry of our fast and mass produced food… In articulating visual antecedents for the foods she paints, Coates isn’t seeking the empirically provable or scientific, but rather operates in the realm of poetic imagination, allusion and pleasure in the strangeness of reality. Her paintings press the absurdity that we might think ourselves anything like our ancient forebears and the vanity in believing that we might have really changed at all.”