I’ve always thought that if you were to take graffiti to the outer most regions of it’s universe, like past the Milky Way’s disk fringes of where graffiti’s sun is, you are getting close to where Antwan Horfee has taken the form. There are other influences in here, the old Disney cartoons which you could see in his past paintings, or a bit of comics, cinema, horror, and of course, the remnants of character-based graffiti. And what he has done is zoomed in so far (or so wide, take your pick) into what images are what is the essence of image-making and blurred, stretched, pixelated, layered, assembled and re-informed his own art practice. Every show he does is exciting, as it pushes abstraction to a limit. For me, at least, that is powerful.
Horfee’s new show at Ceysson & Bénétière Gallery in Luxembourg, oomph, gets back to that concept where as a youth, graffiti is born trying to create something out of nothing and how far that can take you. These paintings are like examinations of space and time, something that is trying to capture movement. I think the way he tried to explore the city, the way a graffiti artist travels through a place and investigates placement, is so inherent in these works. Horfee just keeps exploring boundaries, spaces, the possibility of an image and the potential for a place. There is a lot of oomph in that, and he might be finding the parallel dimensions of graffiti’s promise. —Evan Pricco
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