INTRODUCTION to "Revelations/Zjeveni: Kresby/Drawings by Robert Horvitz"
Published by Galerie Pecka for Exhibition Hall Manes (December 1999)

   by Bruce Sterling


It's quite the pleasure and privilege to write a few words about the work 
of my friend, Robert Horvitz. 

The tools of his art are simple.  It's a profound and passionate art, but 
there is no sentimentality, no preaching.  It's all about the total 
engagement of ink, paper and pen.

It is work that rewards patience, because it is so patiently done.  You 
can sense Horvitz leaning into the paper, engaging every atom of his being 
in the effort.  Every move is small, but cumulative -- but every move may 
be his last.  A single moment's slip can destroy days of labor.  The 
intricacy of Horvitz's drawings resembles computer graphics.  But there is 
no easy, facile, push-button machine work here.  Each mark on that page is 
an act of will.  The artist is walking a tightrope.

Anyone can walk a tightrope--if the rope is lying on the ground.  Anyone 
can set ink to paper, if the results don't matter.  But when Horvitz chooses 
to draw, he has strung his tightrope far above the earth.  He has set himself 
at risk.  He makes few drawings, because the stakes he sets himself are so 
high.   

Horvitz's drawings emerge from deep human passion:  the death of a parent, 
romantic heartbreak, cosmological awe.  The artist is mastering himself 
through his craft.  His ultimate goal is to create his own private realm of 
ecstasy and freedom--a place where the passion, the constraints, and even 
the craft all melt away, a space of heightened awareness.  The space where 
experience becomes art.

There's an underlying logic to the work.  You can sense him working from 
self-set rules, spinning out graphic algorithms.  But it's not mere order:  
it's not a skyscraper made of toothpicks.  The work also knows chaos.  This art 
takes place where life is:  at the rim of order and chaos. The possibility of 
breakdown and loss is always there.  It's a game between virtuosity and wild 
inspiration--so it's no surprise that Horvitz draws creative power from 
jazz.  Sometimes the drawing breaks from the melody and rhythm and surprises 
even itself.  The reward is to find that place where skill can liberate the 
spirit.  Where the artist achieves a level of performance that he could never 
plan, because he did not know it was possible.

These drawings are rare works, because Robert Horvitz is a rare man.  He's the 
sort of fellow who could plunge himself completely into many years of artistic 
dedication, but then transform himself into an everyday agent of the greatest 
political revolution of modern times (working for the Soros foundations to 
help rebuild post-communist societies).  It's no accident that he ended up in 
the alchemical city of Prague.  While he is very much  an American artist, 
some element of his personality makes Horvitz sometimes seem more Czech to me 
than the Czechs themselves.  He seemed to be aware on some higher level that 
the gray uniformity of the Communist past was breaking up into a very new 
picture, something lively, human, flawed and deeply unpredictable.  As he well 
knew, this was happening to millions of people in many different countries, 
but as a living artwork, the Revolution was especially visible in Prague, the 
most musical of all East European capitals.  A popular revolt had broken the old 
rules and was dancing to its own marvelous, local rhythms.  

Now that revolution is well behind us.  Another candidate for World Order is 
on the public stage.  Such is life, and such is history.  It's very much a sign 
of health and promise that Robert Horvitz, former radio activist, has once 
again become a hard-working artist. 

Nowadays his work seems based in new emotions--fatherhood, equanimity, a sense 
of mature possibility, and a genuine love for his adopted city.  I hope and 
believe that, through this exhibition, the lively and sympathetic people of 
Prague will understand and cherish what this man brings to them.

   Bruce Sterling
   Austin, Texas USA 
   1999