(Sean Raspet at Jessica Silverman)
Peter Eleey's exhibition The Quick and the Dead was an expose on the Conceptual art’s hinging of itself on the poetics of its functionlessness, even the driest conceptualizations of dead art scrolls were in lineage with a Caspar David Friedrich existentialism, positioning art within a cerebral vastness and nothingness, conceptual art latently filled with men standing before crashing waves of their romantic ideals. The go-to form of conceptual art now is a mannerist product version of it, sited within minimalist tendencies of theater, ascribing precepts to objects which evoke an endless myriad of poetic feels. The recipe for this process is well understood, the problem lies in making its concoction more concentrate, more acidic, a better product, and once Raspet finally rid himself of the hairgel cubes to present the near nothingness of his thesis show in which the concentration reached peak, and here the ouroboros of its olfactory conceit in which everything and nothing happens in inevitable returns, the vast nothingness spreads before us and the conceptual cymbals crash.
See too : Jason Dodge at Franco Nero