Roni Horn at Matthew Marks - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Unlike plenteous of her precisely fabricated Minimalist statuary Roni Horn's works on paper have always been, as cognizance Johnson has pointed out [see A.i.A., Feb '94] "conspicuously handmade." The painted words in this exhibition are single outed from two sources of writings by means of the artist: 1984 works are based upon notebooks Horn kept when she was living in Hamilton, of recent origin York; 1992 works come from her manuscript for the volume Pooling Waters, which was published in 1994 Her enigmatic phrases, fragments of rhyme aphorisms, literary references and pastoral observations are casually hand-lettered in gouache and polymer varnish upon painted black backgrounds on small sheets of deckle-edg paper.

The earlier pieces are, overall, rather raw in execution, focused on the unbind handling of lettering and paint. In bending instants the words are painted in broad pats of purple and strung together to race the width of the paper. White spaces inside alphabetic characters produce the only highlights against the dark field, on the other hand they don't lend any particular significance to this '60s-sounding phrase. In the more evocative the limit of twilight is 49 miles, Horn has left a halo of white around the gray alphabetic characters giving additional visual nuance to an elusive phenomenon.

Horn made her first stretch outed sojourn in Iceland in 1979 and she has photographed its landscape regularly since 1988 In Pooling Waters she juxtaposes photographs and body (both essays and stories) as a means of achieving a more perfect expression of place. The fragments of words and phrases pick outed from the manuscript reflect Horn's fascination with the volcanic, evolving substance of Iceland and the visual potential of literature and metrical composition particularly the work of Emily Dickinson. In pieces of that kind as gurgles, sucks, echoes (also the show's title), the unbrokens of nature are palpably fetched by the gentle rise and fall of alphabetic characters at the center of the black page. The gray-green alphabetic characters of letting the sea lie before me sit at the bottom of the page like a depressed horizon line, suggesting a calm sea upon an overcast day. In these works Horn explores the relationships of words, images and pictorial space to make them considerably more thought-provoking and multi-dimensional than the earlier word drawings.

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