ANDREAS HORVATH
DISASTERS OF WAR

text by Claire Sykes (as published in PHOTO INSIDER, January/February/March 2003)

At first, you're not sure what you're looking at. Then, from the blurred forms and darkened shapes emerge silhouettes of human bodies falling, faces contorted in agony, vomit exploding. If Andreas Horvath's photographs don't repulse you to the point of turning the page, you begin to also notice the helmets and spears. This is war--not its heroics, but it's horrors--portrayed through the lives and deaths of miniature, toy plastic soldiers.
Inventing violent dramas, Horvath maims, mangles and dismembers the tiny figures, then uses the same medium that documents war-time events to create larger-than-life images that force us to face the gruesome realities of war. His series of four-by-six-foot, untitled, black-and-white photos, "Los Desastres de La Guerra" stands as a monument to the savagery and suffering of war, and to his own pacifist position on the issue. Says the 33-year-old Austrian-born Horvath, currently living in Salzburg, "I'm trying to come to terms with the cruelty of war. I'm trying to get images out from very deep in the back of my mind, images that I've seen before or dreamed about, images we've all seen." Especially those from the Gulf War, the first war of Horvath's generation. "It was a big shock," he says.

Goya's famous etchings of war, after which Horvath named his own series, also has informed his work, with their blatant depiction of rape, mutilation and murder. Then there's the art of Bosch, Breughel and Bacon, and filmmaker David Cronenberg. But when it comes to style, an Abstract Expressionism rides the unconsciously gestural character of Horvath's photos, similar to the vital brush work of Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline. "In this series, I'm trying to get away from photography and more towards painting," he says. "Photography is usually used as a straight-on medium. By not being so realistic, the images in my photos take on a nightmarish quality that becomes symbolic."
Why black-and-white? He says, "Because that's what the first icons of war photography were, such as those by Capa." Those of Vietnam, like the famous one of a young girl running from napalm, and the Gulf War would burn their images into Horvath's brain. Paradoxically, while he uses black-and-white film to lend a photojournalistic truth to his photographs, his choice "makes it more difficult for the viewer to discern whether the figures are real or not. There are some pictures that are more surreal, others more realistic."
Stand close to one of Horvath's photos and you're immersed in its undefined, grainy textures and tones (another nod to Goya's series of war etchings, in this case the aquatint background). Step back and you begin to see what he calls "artificial images," like the row of teeth that was never there before in one of his photos. "I didn't intend to make them," he says. "I saw them only months later, when the picture was hanging in my house." Who would guess that it's toy soldiers? Enlisting those from across the centuries, in his photos Horvath mixes and matches the very objects that glorify war and turn it into an entertainment, to make a statement about war in society throughout all time. "It's absurd, really, these little figures," says Horvath. "Someone has made them for kids to play with, and though they're not made for their facial expressions, someone thought of designing the face, even though you need a magnifying glass to see it. It's facial expressions that I'm trying to get from them."

part two