Works
Press Release
Exhibitions
words by Mitchell Anderson
The gamification of high end systems was one of the most visible outcomes of early Covid lockdown culture. Crypto entered another golden age, GameStop became a meme stock and the flipping of mediocre figurative paintings took on new urgency with the removal of even the option for the responsibility of checking art out in person. All of the seeds for this had been set before in a sort of hypocritical binary that looks to emulate the practices of the rich on one side and also profess to open those practices up in an egalitarian way on the other. The truth is that people will call all those things anything anyone wants as long as they don’t say what it actually is, gambling. Jeronim Horvat’s recent works take their conceptual nucleus from these occurrences and the human desire for the scientific spiritual, where the right information given at the right moment might change one’s fate.
His interventions don’t so much make a connection between the market of trading and that of art, as much as they shine wonky lights upon both. His coopting of content through form are duplicitous. The language of hard edge paintings, of wall hanging minimalism, the shaped canvas is flipped into the language of charts. Form becomes a way to bring order, for outlooks into the future, for past projections. They speak as much to the ups and downs of life, as they do to markets, to data, to pure painted form. His use of steel as canvas removes the basic organic from seven centuries of painting, a cold neutrality that deadens the world as it reflects it back on the viewer. That trustable material has undergone changes as Horvat messes up the promise of purity with the language of art. Engraved, painted with a painterly touch the seamless surfaces of these works contain layers of creation looking out past art to the worn and the weathered. The engravings of meme character or renaissance symbols of wealth and power rest uneasily as the viewer decodes past their expectation of the graffitied.
Like Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ “Untitled” (21 Days of Bloodwork - Steady Decline) (1994), the minimal, the history of minimal art is forced to contain the world around it that it tries so hard to be above. All of looks at the unsettled standing of reality within the digital world. Modern traders, looking for fortune tellers, cruise our worlds on and offline. It can be shady, but there’s always a kernel of hope. In Horvat’s unfolding of the aesthetics of professionalism, the logos, key cards, ties, it is always unclear, as it is with painting and art, if one is being hanged or hanging oneself.