Notes, duo doodles and word clouds: with Roni Horn a drawing can be anything

Killing time; Nothing new under the sun; break the ice. These everyday expressions and clichés are the stopgap of our language: vague enough to use quite often, but also so concrete that they are not meaningless. The New York artist Roni Horn (1955) collected endless numbers of these phrases and made screen prints of the handwritten words on metre-sized white paper.

The series Wits’ End Mash (2019) is as monumental and solemn as it is raw and commonplace. On the one hand, they look like ethereal clouds of words in a vast emptiness – a wonderful illustration of the transience of language; the words are there for a moment and then they are gone. On the other hand, because of the wild, handwritten scribbles, it is also reminiscent of a scratched toilet door in a raucous nightclub. For example, Horn emphasizes the people of flesh and blood who utter these words.

The works are wonderfully ambiguous in an additional way: on the one hand the expressions are very local (emphatically American: ‘Elvis has left the building‘), as universal (the Dutch phrases that started this piece are all in English on Horn’s works).

‘Human Minimalist’

Ambiguity, hybrid, just in between: that’s exactly where Roni Horn (1955) prefers to be. In all her work (photos, sculptures, installations, books, drawings) fluidity, change and elusive phenomena such as ‘the weather’ are the main subject. The androgynous artist has been called a ‘human minimalist’: she knows how to convey something personal in a strict, thin formal language. She also has permanent fascinations: repetition, water, Iceland. An example of such a simple concept with major consequences: in Iceland, which she loves, she made the permanent installation Vatnasafn / Library of Water (2007): room-high transparent cylinders, filled with water from the country’s 24 glaciers.

In the Netherlands, Horn is best known for the enormous transparent glass cylinders – colorful ‘drops’ that have been on display in Museum Voorlinden, De Pont and Kröller-Müller, among others. The sides of those cylinders have been left rough, the top of the glass is ground, it shines as if there is a layer of water on it. As a spectator you can disappear into them: they respond beautifully to the light. What you see is difficult to place: it is as fluid as it is solidified, as light as it is heavy. Everything at the same time, permanently in motion.

In her Brussels gallery Xavier Hufkens, Roni Horn now presents three recent series of drawings – according to the gallery her ‘primary activity’ and ‘a kind of breathing activity on a daily basis’. series mentioned above Wits’ End Mash (2019) is the absolute highlight of this – the meaning lingers. The other two series unfortunately disappoint: the meaning evaporates immediately.

Notes and doodles

The series Red Figure (2022) is too hermetic to appeal to the imagination. The actual title is 66 words longer, beginning: ‘An elusive red figure darting about in the Venetian darkness; a red dwarf burning out beyond Saturn;…’. This indulgence characterizes the work: a long series of two ‘pages’ each time, as in an open book. On it you will find combinations of photos, handwritten (diary) notes, monochrome color areas, maps, pages from books and newspapers. The date is always included as a log.

The problem is that there are hardly any clues for the unsuspecting viewer: of course you recognize locations (Austerlitz, New York) and themes (notes about the weather, a hermaphrodite fish), but the connection remains unclear. Of course, everything is in motion and even a note (an onset to…) can be a work of art, but this needs more elaboration. Redfigure is a messy account of the passage of time, from which nothing lasts.

Vanishing also does the meaning in the series Fricks and Fracks (2022). The name refers to the English expression for a duo that can hardly be distinguished from each other. Horn made groups of four drawn ‘duo-doodles’: hand-drawn spirals, circles, dots and grid patterns. The drawings hang on the wall like a kind of open memory game: you see differences and similarities. They are not as ‘recent’ as the title of the exhibition suggests: Horn already made such pairs in the 1990s. And Horn played a similar game with difference and similarity rather masterfully with photos. For example in the classic You Are The Weather (1994-1996): a series of close-up portraits of an Icelandic woman in a hundred different hot springs. The differences in those photos are striking: because something of the human being and something of the weather sneaks into the photos.

With the hand-drawn doodles, the abstract shapes look random and have little more to say than: indeed you never draw exactly the same thing twice. It is a surprising, but also disappointing paradox: precisely in the work where the hand of the artist is most visible, humanity is absent.