Reception: November 9th | 5pm-8pm

Ever Gold [Projects] presents The Qualitative Validation Principle, Marc Horowitz’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. The paintings and drawings on view extend the forensic system Horowitz began developing after visiting the Roman ruins in Milreau, Portugal, which inspired him to restage previously abandoned works using archeological motifs.

Within Horowitz’s oeuvre, TQVP constitutes a dark chapter that explores the color palette he has used since his days as a Bay Area performance artist in the early 2000s. Long veering between various comedic roles, Horowitz has settled on something mute like Harpo Marx, deadpan in the way only an image could be: a dissected tableaux vivant where the lifelike turns against the abstract and serialized, where the counterpoint between organic and artificial forms becomes unsettled.

Large, blackened canvases are spread throughout the exhibition space while towering monochromatic paintings cut them into a 3-dimensional grid. Ashen figures, burned into the black canvases, suggest skeletal impressions, the arboreal and humanoid remnants of an in-progress experiment. Testing the range of his impulses, Horowitz questions the degree of change, discordance, and ambiguity a body of work can withstand. How, for example, can improvisation and performativity rest within a system in which color and format, material and size are predetermined?

TQVP is at times a painterly Rorschach test that asks the viewer to inhabit decisions made by the artist to expose the detritus of his own jokes, but it also seems like something or someone decided to go off script along the way. Or, that an off-color joke, though aborted, continues to make appearances, to refer to a glyph or key which would unlock deeper meanings if it were available. Alas, some mysteries remain precisely within the surface on which they were inscribed, alluding to and denying their secret in the same gesture.

Marc Horowitz (b. 1976) lives and works in Los Angeles. His aesthetic practice spans photography, sculpture, painting, installation, video, and performance. A Creative Time Project Grant Awardee, Horowitz has taught at the University of Southern California, the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Otis College, and lectured at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), the Hammer Museum, Stanford University, and Yale. Recent exhibitions include: Jonathan Hopson, Houston; Johannes Vogt, New York; Ever Gold [Projects], San Francisco; Bank Gallery, Shanghai; COMA Gallery in Sydney, Australia; Mannerheim Gallery, Paris; China Art Objects, Los Angeles; and the Depart Foundation, Los Angeles.