Iran do Espirito Santo at Sean Kelly Gallery is the Daily Pic by Blake Gopnik
Three sculptures from the "Globe" series (Photo by Lucy Hogg)
They look as banal as could be: A shelf full of old lighting globes made from white glass, some left with smudges of dirt. Readymades, redux. But Iran do Espirito Santo, the fine Brazilian conceptualist now showing at Sean Kelly Gallery in New York, could never be as straightforward as that – and he isn’t. His banal “fixtures” are deluxe facsimiles of the real things, turned in Italy from solid white marble. They have a glorious crystalline glow, and their “smudges” are the veining you’d see on the finest Renaissance busts. The artist has replaced the trivial, the ephemeral, the breakable, with something precious and massy that’s made to last.
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