“Opulence, you own everything!” (2021)

Exhibited at the  House of Arts in Ústí Nad Labem in the group exhibition Mythology Heritage curated by Jan Nový & Adéla Machová.

In his ongoing project, Gideon Horváth dealt with the contemporary representation of the mythological figure of the faun and its bacchanalian world. He observes and reimagines their universe with the help of queer-ecological theories and current underground queer cultures. He treats the faun as an exiled figure focusing on his queer hypersensitivity and the gesture of resilience which both appear as emancipatory powers. The American documentary Paris Is Burning (1990, dir. Jennie Livingston), which has greatly inspired the work, documents the drag ballroom scene of the eighties of New York. The title of the work, a quote by the character Mercedes Iman Diamond, is a statement that reflects upon the richness that is the chameleon-like ability of the queer contestants of the voguing balls. They can mold into many shapes and take up almost any form, much like the material of the beeswax that the artist works with. He considers it a constantly changing and fluid, queer material. The work is a take on the cornucopia of the Roman goddess of fertility, Ops. Opulence in his take is a queer quality that helps to either seamlessly blend into the norms of the oppressive heteronormative society or subvert it and create something unexpected that can guide us towards much-needed change of perspective.