Spread across three venues, Roni Horn’s exhibition at Raffaella Cortese in Milan celebrates the gallery’s thirtieth anniversary and its long-standing collaboration with the American artist, which began in 1997. The project focuses exclusively on works on paper from 2016 to 2023, emphasizing drawing as a “primary activity” in Horn’s creative process. Integrated into a broader practice that moves fluidly between sculpture, photography, the written word, and books, drawing has become a constant source of inspiration and contemplation, as well as a means of reflecting on the notion of identity, as seen in many of the artist’s works. According to the press materials, drawing is a central element that “explores linguistic limits and sculptural potential through processes of constructing, deconstructing, and reconstructing images, collages, photographs, quotations, notes, and texts.”
The first venue foregrounds the “Frick and Fracks” series (2018–22 and 2016–23). Each work comprises eight gouache and watercolor drawings, arranged in lines: two sets of three, and one of two. From a distance, the piece resembles a composition of undefined vegetal species or cellular organisms spilling out from the white of the wall or paper. But up close, they reveal a play of repetition and variation – a kind of mnemonic choreography in which mirrored forms mutate just enough to evade total symmetry. This visual logic is reminiscent of the memory game in which players must remember pairs of cards by turning them over. However, there is a slight difference here. In Horn’s artistic vision, subtle variations always exist and interplay, and it is within these modulations that new identities can mold and emerge. The eye is constantly stimulated as it moves from one drawing to another, looking for similarities and divergences.
The same themes are reiterated in the “Slarips” series (2023), the title itself a reversal of “spirals.” Here, four graphite and watercolor works on paper face each other across opposing walls in the adjacent room. These works confront one another as if attempting to embrace a single, unified universe, which is never fully achieved. Each piece is, rather, a constellation in itself: a tessellated composition created from drawings that Horn cut out on small cards and reassembled. The collage medium garners here an even more open-ended attitude. Each piece is a reinvention of a mosaic-like blending structure, where full and empty spaces engage in a formal dialogue, enabling immersive and unmediated encounters with a multitude of potential compositions that are also referenced in the titles of each individual work — different misspellings of the word “spirals.” In this way the works reflect the multiplicity of identity construction, revealing frayed images that seek stability that deliberately eludes them. Although language is visually absent, the titles of these two series attest to Horn’s longstanding interest in idioms and slang.
The second part of the exhibition comprises An elusive Red Figure… (2022), a large-scale installation of four hundred and six individual works, presented as a new evolution of the series “LOG (March 22, 2019 – May 17, 2020).” If there’s anything to effectively draw these works together, it’s a sense of intimate revelation that incorporates the written word (quotations, notes, news, and comments) and the visual element (personal photographs, film stills, and images of animals). This section introduces a visual cacophony, which was absent from the previous series. If “Frick and Fracks” and “Slarips” were “silent,” here voices and screams question the observer or convey an emotional state.
In White Raven 1: Red Hope (2022), for instance, the phrase “I am paralyzed with hope” (a quote by American stand-up comedian and actress Maria Bamford) is repeated on a red page until it resembles a scratching sound — akin to a desperate cry for help from the masses — and becomes more relevant and touching today than ever. Similarly, Screaming • Heat Wave (2022) shows the artist with her mouth wide open. Just below the photo, as if it were a diary entry, she writes: “I’m beside myself. I’m losing my head, I want to pull my hair out. It’s getting under my skin and taking my breath away, I could cry my eyes out or laugh my head off.” It is precisely this diaristic approach, undertaken daily for fourteen months, that encapsulates the poetic aspirations of the entire series. Here, each piece builds on another through repetition and variation in time and space.
The voices “rise” even higher in the third venue, where the exhibition concludes with the “Wits’ End Mash” series (2019). This consists of four large, overlapping silkscreens bearing up to three hundred and fifty handwritten proverbs and idiomatic phrases, which the artist asked three hundred people to write down. Letters swarm in a chaotic manner, appearing in various colors and transparencies and overlapping to configure layered and abstract visual compositions. “He’s as cute as a bug’s ear”; “going to hell in a handbasket”; “beat around the bush”; or “like ships passing in the night” are just some of the idioms that culminate in a collective voice of knowledge.
By immersing the viewer in a complex yet direct relationship with a stream of words and images — already formed or in the process of becoming — Horn’s paper compositions act as visual and sound scores. Nothing is the same in these compositions; no identity is stable. What appears the same always differs. What could be unitary turns out to be fragmented and difficult to reconstruct yet worthy of recording. What initially appears as an intimate voice is mixed with the voices and stories of others. Finally, this multitude of voices that seem to converge toward a unifying form disperses into chaos. Even the most common, everyday, codified speech becomes incomprehensible, elusive, and chaotic.
