FOR EYES ON TIPS OF BULLHORNS

Alex Kvares is a New York-based artist whose artistic practice examines decaying systems and the mechanics of a collapsing patriarchy. From his earlier highly detailed graphite abstractions to his most recent work of image generation within the world of artificial intelligence, Kvares marries the horrific with the hypnotic to challenge systemic notions around politics, masculinity and violence.

In the body of work presented here, the artist brings forth interiors populated by the ghosts of a ruined military. Within a theater inspired by folklore and fairytales, the artist combines floral ornamentation, objects of antiquity and decorative patterning with distorted figures and war-torn limbs - a confluence that undercuts notions of masculinity, manifesting a spectacle that is both self-mocking and absurd. Born from the grids of old engineering logbooks, these ghoulish processions of "Hussar" characters in Napoleonic clothing inhabit a nightmarish stage that is formally beautiful but conceptually morose.

Kvares' fascination with a certain grotesque aesthetic can be traced to the young artist's exposure to the horror movie genre, made all the more alluring because, in his native country of Ukraine (at the time the USSR), while not censored outright, horror was considered obscene. The genre as a whole presented a bleak outlook that was viewed critically by communist countries; they identified the influx of schlock culture to be reflective of what Marx described as capitalism's "vampire thirst for the living blood of labor".  Horor was ripe for interpretation by the young artist, whose aesthetic sensibility became shaped by the visual language of Western directors (think David Cronenberg's use of "body horror" and George Romero's apocalyptic hordes of zombies). 

Growing up with the legacy of war (as well as in a city neighboring Chernobyl),  Kvares became increasingly intrigued with horror's ability to symbolize humanity's existential anxiety. "[In addition to horror films] I grew up with movies full of military characters -- War and Peace, as well as World War II narratives. Drawing these macabre scenes of soldiers in gala uniforms was a way of having the freedom to play around within a hermetic narrative that was far enough removed historically and geographically from 'relevant' political discourse."

The resulting artworks included in For Eyes on Tips of Bullhorns are rich in both formal and allegorical complexity, where dense marks of line and color depict a topography of soiled martyrs, melding the grotesque with a poetic vigor in ways that we have yet to unpack.