Antwan Horfee first gained recognition as an independent creative artist in Paris. Inspired by Avant-Garde art movements, he projects the action and performative aspect of his work outdoors into his gallery work, still using spray techniques for his abstracted and slightly distorted representations. He skilfully combines figurative and abstract elements, in works that are often critical about the contemporary art world and the art historical canon.
The often surreal characters in his works, which are dominated by abstract gestures, are signs of an age of diversity, noise, abundance, and uncertainty. His intense dynamics and colour palette are symptomatic of a time when the flow of (digital) images is extensive and fast. He allows coincidences to affect his works in order to create an individual, nuanced and contemporary visual language.
Recently, Antwan Horfee has also been working on animated movies. He makes a great amount of drawings by hand, which he then processes digitally. Inspired by old and contemporary animation, and by vintage Japanese anime movies, his films are dreamlike rhythmic flows of mesmerizing, pulsating movement. His imaginative style, which combines figuration and the abstract, literally comes to life. In addition, the animation is in itself a form of abstraction, when it distorts or deconstructs the already surreal characters of the story.
The animations are created by placing drawings on thin transparent plastic sheets on top of each other. In doing so, the artist creates a layered three-dimensionality. This technique is an extension of Horfee’s practice, of which drawing is the center and the basis, and in which he investigates ways to project drawing into the contemporary (art) climate. He often makes drawings not on paper, but on a transparent sheet of thick industrial plastic, wishing for the work to stand the test of time (whereas drawings on paper are more fragile) and allowing light and shadow to add coincidental layers to the work. In a similar way, his animations challenge the conventions of drawing by desacralizing the technique - one minute of animation requires ca. 2500 drawings and thus the primary focus is no longer the singular drawing but the movement and imagination it can produce.
text- Tamara Beheydt