On the top floor of The Gaylord Apartments, a spare selection of seven new paintings by Magnus Peterson Horner tingles the optic and haptic senses, even when they’re barely paintings, even when they’re barely there at all.
Horner paints people as if sensed through eyes hardly cleared of amniotic fluid: a vision that’s fuzzy and faint, but still so raw that we barely know what to do with it.
Portrait of a Young Boy and Head of a Young Boy (all works 2025) show broken perceptions, so decomposed that the impression of a personal presence takes several seconds to emerge. Each ekes out a minimum of differentiation between figure and ground, so that the surface and the painted skin do not really split, remaining interpermeated.
From there on, every surface looks like sensitive skin. Gazing at these surfaces leads to an uncomfortable vicarious feeling, a sense that we—the viewers—suffer from the same sensitive skin condition suggested by the paintings’ odd texture. Bust of a Woman bears a broken fragment of torso, the sense of exposure heightened by the texture of the figure, which the painter deforms with a puckering or blistering technique. Other likenesses are smeared with photo developer, a chemical foreign to the medium. It curdles the paint and quite literally makes the represented skin crawl, impeding the viewer’s reading of the limited tracings that emerge.
Installation view, Magnus Peterson Horner, 2025. Courtesy of Gaylord Fine Arts.
Even more friction comes from the angle of representation itself: if this is portraiture, it’s rethought from such a distant starting point that a first walk through the exhibition might permit little more than a marvel at the scattered strangeness of the artist’s imagination. One untitled painting consists of only a mesh cloth stretched on a wooden armature. In another, around the corner, Kraft singles set behind picture glass create an imperfect checkerboard pattern. It’s unclear whether Horner foresaw how the cheese would mold or planned the squares’ decomposition, which is proceeding in an orderly right-to-left direction.
And yet ghosts of association among these incompatible objects somehow float back in. These affinities are not so much narrative as primitively sensory, charged with reflexes rather than stories: the mold recast as a complexion’s floral outbreak, the mesh charged with an aura of cheesecloth wringing liquid from a lump of organic matter. The grid of threads hints at a kind of straining but doesn’t perform it, making present just the sensitivity, the foretaste of sensation.
While staring into the checkerboard’s edge, fraying greenish, I thought of Harmony Korine’s 1997 movie Gummo. Why? Horner’s paintings don’t shock; nothing resembles the explicit abuse and cat killing for which Gummo is notorious. Perhaps the framed cheese reminded me of a stray detail from the movie: a strip of bacon taped to bathroom tile behind the boy-narrator, Solomon, as he eats dinner in the tub. But I don’t think the connection is superficial. Horner’s persistent subject, oftentimes just glimpsed through fits and starts, is the same excruciating exposure of childhood that Korine’s film pushed to an extreme.
Portrait of a Young Boy, 2025.
To be clear, it’s Solomon, not Korine, that Horner resembles. His paintings evidence a certain distinctive imagination, unpredictable and frank, which resonates as a generational sensibility. In a past exhibition at the Queens gallery Gandt, for example, Horner showed a painting of a still from a game of Fortnite played by a boy he babysat. But the impression of the virtual world was so defamiliarized that it could only have been found by eyes completely foreign to the game, or ones so glued to it that any ordinary familiarity had melted away.
If it’s true that Horner’s mind was embedded formatively in a deep matrix of media, in these new paintings he seems to have come out the other side. Nothing digital is present, except perhaps as a sort of afterburn that washes out a painting like Head of a Young Boy, which might show how a sunlit face appears to immoderately online eyes. Horner paints not the liquid crystal screen, but the effect that it produces. The viewing angle of Girl with a Kitten, stuck at an odd angle of fixation, could similarly be read as an aftereffect of POV inundation, but only if you go out on a limb. These symptoms aren’t specific to any technology in particular. The congenitally fuzzy gaze they bespeak feels more general, or even, again, generational.
This persistent sense of disorientation is a strength, and it’s heightened by a confident restraint in curation. I was told by the Gaylord gallerists that a good chunk of the works Horner brought from New York were, upon deliberation, tucked out of sight. I’d have loved to see them, but their absence only adds to the square-one charge. The same goes for the press release: there wasn’t one. Rigorous subtraction fuels the fantasy of new eyes, or newly perceptive ones, concentrating focus on the acute sensation of what survives the paring-down. Here, realized in sparse gestures, it’s a world almost painfully lush.