John Hrehov: An Appreciation
Exhibition Catalogue, Denise Bibro Fine Art, New York. February, 1999
by James Yood

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Reality is inelegant. It lacks focus and composition, it's haphazard and diffuse, and can seem too random and just a small nudge away from chaos. But art! Art can take reality (it doesn’t have to, of course, but it can) and re-present it as a site of order and logic, as a manifestation of the human mind and/or spirit, rectilinear, symmetrical, reasoned, at peace. Artists such as John Hrehov do that, they live in the same world we all do, but they sense secret and underlying harmonies most of us miss, they are drawn to construct moments of exquisite equipoise, and create those vignettes where the simple becomes the profound, where the things we see every day suddenly become so fraught with possibilities and meaning that they become poetry. People are almost never present in Hrehov's work; however, there is really nothing else to call him but a humanist, an artist who sees the trappings of the human drama potentially embedded in everything around him, who can make a window sill seem an altar where anything is possible and can turn a garden sprinkler into an onrush of spirit. Hrehov's paintings and drawings offer again and again a kind of poignant revelation, not with a bang or a whimper, but as situated just around the corner, just in the next room, perhaps in the back yard down the street, if we could only free ourselves to see it waiting there. In Hrehov's work the everyday becomes an aperture to the eternal, and the domestic realm hints toward a site of infinite majesty.

Hrehov's is an art of reflection and clarification. Among the pictorial tools he has mastered are those of employing scrupulous symmetry and almost always positioning his elements fully parallel or perpendicular to the picture plane. His works employ pictorial order to present them as distillations, suddenly expectant and charged with a quiet fire that burns hot and true. Take, for example, My Father's House, 2007. Beneath a burning sky, through a darkling wood, the house sits, modest, sedate, keeping its secrets well. Does this painting refer to, well, Hrehov's father's house, or to the verse from the Gospel of St. John? Is this an image of a stunningly modest heaven or of a more personal drama? It is hard to say, the center of Hrehov's aesthetic is this charged dualism, to offer the sacramental in the mundane, to make accessible and ordinary the infinite and the transcendent, to see them not as two, but as one. Is House Cat, 2007, just a genre scene, an episode of everyday life, a witty capturing of life glimpsed from the street, offered to invite a complicit smile of recognition? Or might it be of something broader, an inquiry into the act of looking, hinting at the secrets behind the façade of every residence, of the ineffable and unsolvable mystery that's always just a few doors away from your home? Why can't it be both?

Hrehov can get a great deal more specific - Awake, 2006, is crisp and overt, which doesn’t mean it cannot be subtle as well. The candles - note the three different candlesticks - seem outside rather than inside, the window raised so we can see their pools of light intersect in beautiful geometric interplay on some patio or ledge. The four differently colored huts lined up in the distance become both inevitable and impossible, too tiny for human habitation, too close together, more like cells than abodes, though someone seems resident in one of them. Font, 2006-7 is precisely that, a font only briefly masquerading as a birdbath. With almost a mania of symmetrical composition (even the trees seem to bend in unison; Hrehov's taut compositional organization reflect his long-standing interest in the Chicago Imagists, his parallels at times to the work of Roger Brown particularly notable) it hits that true Hrehovian note, the sudden immersion of the spiritual into the vernacular, as if every home could be a church, every backyard a site for miracles. It's an image of sanctification seen on the fly. Even more overt have been Hrehov's works about statuary in the lived environment, Above, 2006, and Saint in the City, 2005. (Is the title of the latter meant to spoof the oh-so-chic Sex in the City?) Such sculpture does exist in the world, though usually only encountered in religious buildings or cemeteries, meditative buildings or sites that focus on the eternal. The two works are different, of course, Above depicts a sculpture of an angel, an intercessory figure not of this earth, a vehicle to transport us to a world beyond. The armor clad warrior figure in Saint in the City seems to be positioned just a block or so from downtown, a bit grim and militant, a sentinel literally on guard, ready to wield that sword if necessary.

It has been a curious tendency in contemporary culture to conflate the terms "secular" and "humanism," as if the effort to understand humankind can only take place in some solely scientific and rational sphere. But there can be, there always has been, other ways of thinking about what it means to be human, tied to systems of faith or belief that see broad rhythms of being around us, that see logic and reason tempered by transcendence and the possibilities of eternal harmonies. John Hrehov takes us to that latter place, and in his work offers a valuable model of what could be called spiritual humanism.

This article originally appeared in a February, 1999 exhibition catalogue from Denise Bibro Fine Art in New York.

James Yood teaches art history at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and directs its New Arts Journalism program.