 Arabella Sfizz & Bobo Benbou Oil on canvas & panel, 40" x 45" Robert Horvath Too Good for Love Portraiture is a dominating genre in Robert Horvath's painting. Although using art historical references through specific compositions, postures, and hand gestures, the paintings move beyond traditional portraits by heightening and distorting the sitters posture and tonality. Through manipulative lighting and foreshortening to distort the figurative features, the subjects become compositionally charged allowing the flat, vacuous and nonspecific backgrounds to develop rhetoric between the real and unreal. This precarious contradictive position between the real and unreal is the harbor in Horvath's work. The paintings challenge the idea of an individual's presentation and representation questioning the stability of identity through appearance. Clothing and cosmetics have constantly provided a counter-culture the mechanism for self-expression. Sometimes revealing, other times concealing, this new identity often proliferates nighttime subcultures. Constructions of sexual identity and sexual behavior are particularly evident within club culture. "Clubbers" reconfigure sexual behavior through the use of explicitly glamorous and sexualized clothing that provocatively reveals the body. Clothing textures and crowded venues emphasize tactile pleasures as key erotic components of this kind of nightlife. Colored and pulsating lights within the club environment contribute to a hypnotic and disorienting sensation that allows formations of diversity and bends the secure feelings of gender identities. Robert Horvath's technical and interpretative prowess enlivens the canvas. His subjects spring to life evoking a sense of modernity and nostalgia. Regardless of age, the work allows the viewers a reminiscent moment of their own counter-culture zeitgeist. Exhibition: September 9 - October 2, 2004 Gallery hours: Tue-Sat 11 am - 6 pm lyonswiergallery 511 W 25th St., No. 205 USA-New York, NY 10001 Telephone +1 212 242 62 20 Fax +1 212 242 62 38 Email lyonswier@hotmail.com www.lyonswiergallery.com |
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