Ceal Floyer Massimo at Minini, Brescia

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Historical anti-retinal trends led to concerns with meaning, to an audience's battles with "getting it." Many things were written, both for and against. But eventually getting it was the prize, was the humor, conceptual art distilled to its simplest form, comedy. The set-up, delivery and a vast emptiness. But these begin toying with something different. Almost nothing to get, attempts at non-meaning, attempts on its life. Anti-thought art. A head "kept clear" with the sound of one hand clapping, masturbation pleasure.

AR: Ceal Floyer at Aargauer Kunsthaus

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The aesthetics of small cleverness - the set-up, tension and click of conclusion- and its bathetic pull, "this interplay of expectation and disappointment." Floyer's work has always felt like mocking tragedies, less fun than sinisterly aware of their exchange of the broken sad comedy of puns as like existentially it, this small disappointment threatening to replace understanding with "getting it," our world as a series of painfully dumb effects.