At the end of his first year as an MFA student, Robert Horvath received a disastrous critique. He’d been painting the same sort of imagery for years, encouraged by his instructors at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to continue making landscapes with anatomically correct hearts floating over them. Then, in the spring of 2000, a visiting curator “ripped me apart,” Horvath says, “and asked questions I couldn’t answer–like why do you paint like this?” Horvath decided to take time off and discovered that, “for a little town, Champaign has an interesting nightlife.” He also found out what it feels like to be “a piece of meat.”
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When Horvath began painting again a few months later, his first image was a portrait of himself dressed in a shirt with ruffles, his hair slicked to one side, holding a piece of meat in his hands–what he calls a “sleazy, overtanned car salesman look.” For the last decade he’s traveled whenever possible, and in the last four years has visited clubs in New York, Rome, Singapore, and Kuala Lumpur. “The pattern is the same everywhere,” he says, “the same music, same lighting effects.” Most of his 14 new paintings at Aron Packer show multiple figures against one or two brightly colored backgrounds; he met some of the models in clubs and others at the gym (“It’s the same meat market–it’s all about where your exercise machine is so you can view and be viewed”). In the studio he “orchestrates” and photographs his models in 50 to 100 poses, changing the color of his lights, then paints from one of the images. He titles most of his paintings with the “snooty stage names” he invents for his characters, inspired by the way people in clubs “take on new personalities.”
Horvath, who was born in what is now Slovakia in 1974, was painting in oil by first grade. As a child he particularly loved a Caravaggio painting he saw in a book of a boy holding a fruit basket, and Caravaggio remains an inspiration. “He was also a troublemaker,” Horvath says, “who was involved in the nightlife of his time.” After his parents paid a substantial fee for Robert to come to the United States in 1992 as a high school exchange student, he arrived in Texas to discover that his new family wanted him to work as an unpaid laborer on their ranch and attend church every Sunday. But he made some friends in high school and later left to live with one of them. In 1993 he was awarded a full scholarship to study art at Midwestern State University, in Wichita Falls.
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When: Through February 11
