WARLOCK KILLJOY - ANTWAN HORFEE

Antwan Horfee’s exhibition WARLOCK KILLJOY is multifaceted, yet all the different mediums and genres he deploys, both real and virtual, coalesce into one large and organic conceptual world. “Iconography bulimia, vomiting assemblage and searching to organize what is not yet melted by stomach acids,” is Horfee’s comment on this universe of his creation. The painted image seems to digest all of it, arrange it, sort it out, abstract it, translate it into a blur, and suffuse it with air and light. If abstraction in American Expressionism was a very serious concern, intended to serve a global political purpose as well as a deep psychological one, in Horfee’s work it is a form of relief from what has been witnessed, a reconciliation between childhood dreams, teenage graffiti on the streets, and adult humor in an earnest painting style. At the same time, they seem like a flickering screen, an almost virtual world, if you squint your eyes or, on the contrary, leave them open until the images merge together. A more accurate description of Horfee’s painting style might be “psychedelic science-fiction abstraction”—a stylistic term created especially for him. “I don’t feel at all like a painter, I feel like I first need to build paintings to organize topics and shapes and vocabulary,” reflects Horfee.

Text by Larissa Kikol