el celso

Art has a life cycle, a beginning and end. For years, I've worked as a street artist, putting up works that were destined to die: painted over by fellow artists & covered up by advertising. It's humbling, turning every work into something fleeting. But it's something that’s led me to explore the precious ways in which we regard art. In recent years, I've undertaken a number of performance-based actions intended to explore the temporary nature of objects: a trading post that dispensed lottery tickets that in order to be scratched would destroy an original drawing; a gallery opening on a construction site in Queens that was eventually razed; a room-sized maze hammered together out of painted canvases; an outdoor art burning, timed to coincide with Miami's art fairs, in which I immolated the works of dozens of international artists. Why destroy? Because sometimes objects are rendered infinitely more priceless when they no longer exist.