Petra Cortright & Marc Horowitz at L21 Gallery

Artist: Petra Cortright, Marc Horowitz

Exhibition title: ZUCCHETTE VETTII

Venue: L21 Gallery, Mallorca, Spain

Date: November 20, 2020 – February 5, 2021

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and L21 Gallery, Mallorca

“ZUCCHETTE VETTII” presents a series of collages by Marc Horowitz that radically re-contextualize the signifiers of historical and contemporary American culture. Referring to both Francis Picabia and Mike Kelley, Horowitz creates a diverse yet singular visual universe that aesthetically folds on itself in unexpected ways. Cortright’s paintings on aluminum or linen are created in Photoshop using software and appropriating images, icons and strokes. In this way, her paintings become finite, but her range of motifs and markings, and her disorienting perspectives and dimensions suggest dynamic change.

Petra Cortright (1986) is based in Los Angeles. She studied Fine Art at Parsons School of Design, The New School, New York, NY (2008). Solo exhibitios include: borderline aurora borealis. team, Gallery, inc, Nueva York (2020); LUCKY DUCK LIGHTS OUT, 1301 PE, Los Ángeles (2019); Computer Paintings on Linen, Galeria Duarte Sequeira, Braga, Portugal (2019) y PLATINUM BLONDE BLACK KNIGHT, Société, Berlin, Alemania (2018). Group exhibitions include: .paint, MCA, Chicago, IL (2020); The Body Electric, Walker Art Center, Mineapolis, MN; Dirty Protest: Selections from the Hammer, Hammer Museum, LA, CA; Hate Speech: Aggression and Imitation, Künstlerhaus, Halle für Kunst & Medien, Graz, Austria (all 2019) and Electronic Superhighway, Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK (2016).

Marc Horowitz (1976) is based in Los Angeles. Solo exhibitios include: Diagrams for Living, No Gallery, Los Ángeles, CA (2020); Time Pools, Mindy Solomon Gallery, Miami, FL (2020); Nothing on the other side of the slash, Johannes Vogt, Nueva York, NY (2019) y Thank you. That was quite illuminating, COMA Gallery, Sydney, Australia (2016). His work has been shown collectively in: Please Touch the Art, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Salt Lake City, UT (2020); Bodega Imprimatur, Face Guts, LA, CA (2019); A Store Show, Odd Ark, Los Ángeles, CA (2019); The Barn Show, Johannes Vogt, East Hampton, NY (2018) Y CA TROPICAL PUNCH Galerie Nathalie Halgand, Vienna, Austria (2016).

RADIANT COOL

“discrete affair”_FIC VA503+ jumpers_+gear +unix

Pay-per-click is a form of online marketing in which advertisers pay an amount of money (fixed or determined by auction) when users click their ads to visit their website. Advertisers bid on the perceived value of a click in relation to the combination of keywords that an user employs such as “car rental”. Searching engines like Google are becoming the ultimate philosophical machine1 which regulates our dialogue with the world. In this way, individual words have gained power over grammatical constructions. As in plant reproduction, these words are packaged in a seed and used as an agent of dispersal through digital cut-and-paste actions on the internet. If thought corrupts language, then language can also corrupt thought. “Latte near me”.

DEATHKARZ “australia” and “songlines” and “dreamtime”_102.1

I saw Mondrian’s early work, paintings of flowers. Well, that sort of stuck in the back of my mind ever since: spring-time blossom. Why did he paint flowers for most of his life? On the Guggenheim’s website collection there it says that reflecting on his attraction to the subject, he wrote, “I find flowers beautiful in their exterior beauty yet there is hidden within a deeper beauty”2… It is also in these paintings that he began to employ techniques such as passage. Patch- like brushwork that breaks up the contours that seem to define two-dimensional forms, in a way that surfaces appear to flow together, blurring the distinction between solid form and surrounding space. Over a century later, using Photoshop in elaborating a painting resonates with former avant-garde methodologies. It allows for an extremely fluid means by which to produce new hybrid textures and to multiply endlessly the number of possible outcomes.

Embrace Inefficiency

Let’s introduce a joke that accompanies the next argument: “If you think colours aren’t funny… then you lack a sense of hue-mour”. 😛
The eyes are most sensitive to red. Red has the longest wave length of the colours visible to the human eye whereas violet has the shortest (remember the acronym VIBGYOR to recall the order of seven colours in the spectrum of white light). If you look at this painting from far away, dust, moist and other elements in the gallery’s atmosphere will interact with the daylight as it travels to your eye. These interferences tend to diminish the strength of the light, a sort of glitch in our visual system. But red adapts the eye for the dark. Infra-red. “As a transparency, it is a mask in a way, filtering light, dramatically altering the perception of the piece, the writing, the composition”.

Future (past)

A hypertext is defined by the RAE as a system of data organisation based on the linking of text or graphic fragments to other fragments, which allows the user to access the information not necessarily in a sequential way but from any of the different related items. To stage painting as a discursive, fragmented medium makes it possible for single connecting threads to be assembled into a woven interconnectedness in which the strength of connection derives from the partial overlapping of many different strands of connectedness (oil, pencil, marker, inkjet transparency, film gel, tape, collage on paper). It has suddenly become obvious that no topic neither image is as regular and simple as was once assumed.

-Cristina Ramos

[1] As suggested by Boris Groys in the essay “Google: Words beyond Grammar” published for Documenta 13, 2012.
[2] https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/2999. Retrieved October 3, 2020.

Petra Cortright & Marc Horowitz, ZUCCHETTE VETTII, 2020, exhibition view, L21 Gallery, Mallorca

Marc Horowitz, Viral effect, 2020, Marker, dura-lar, film gel, tape, collage on paper, 76.2 x 56.52 cm

Marc Horowitz, Future (past), 2020, Oil, pencil, marker, inkjet transparency, film gel, tape, collage on paper, 76.2 x 56.52 cm

Marc Horowitz, Devalued time/repetition, 2020, Marker, film gel, tape, collage on paper, 55.88 x 76.2 cm

Marc Horowitz, It’s not up to you who will survive, 2020, Oil, acrylic, transparency, film gel, tape, collage on board, 81.28 x 101.6 cm

Marc Horowitz, Keep profitable, 2020, Acrylic, marker, pencil, film gel, tape, collage on paper, 96.52 x 64.77 cm

Marc Horowitz, Embrace Inefficiency, 2020, Oil, pencil, marker, inkjet transparency, film gel, tape, collage on paper, 57.15 x 76.20 cm

Marc Horowitz, M(n)iners, 2020, Marker, transparency, tape, collage on paper, 71.12 x 55.88 cm

Petra Cortright, “discrete affair”_FIC VA503+ jumpers_+gear +unix, 2019, Digital painting on Belgian linen, 101.60×76.20 cm

Petra Cortright, Roger Moore_rebirth 1.0 crack_pay-per-click, 2018, Digital painting on gloss paper, face mounted, 101.60×76.20 cm

Petra Cortright, DEATHKARZ “australia” and “songlines” and “dreamtime” 102.1, 2018, Digital painting on gloss paper, face mounted, 102.87 x 77.47 cm