Jonathon Keats’ emotional paint set. The artist is revisiting Abstract Expression with his own Olfactory Expressionism: He paints with pheromones. Viewers in Berlin will hopefully get more of charge from these works than from Pollock’s canvases.
Jonathon Keats has brought the cerebral into the art marketplace. Nearly 15 years ago he sat in a gallery for 24 hours looking at a nude model and selling his thoughts to art collectors. A few years later he copyrighted his mind as a sculpture. In 2004, he tried to genetically engineer God to get to the essence of the Divine. He’s enlisted string theory to purchase real estate in other dimensions, and created a silent four-minute and thirty-three second ring tone remixing John Cage’s composition 4’33” . And he even sold collectors the experience of spending money.
Now in a new exhibit in Berlin he’s presenting a dozen of his “paintings” – made with mixtures of his own pheromones soaked in a linseed oil sauce – in order to get to the heart of Abstract Expressionism, artworks he accuses of being both passive and unsuccessful. In addition to his show in Berlin at Team Titanic, the artist has a project opening in New York June 11-14, and a new book “Forged: Why Fakes are the Great Art of Our Age.” I asked the provocative and art critical artist some questions recently.
Read the interview and see more images here on The Art Blog.
