Tron 11 (gray Pantone 428)

Majerus was born in Luxembourg and spent most of his mature career in Berlin, where he formed part of a vibrant and vital artistic community in the 1990s. He is best known for his appropriations of painters of prior generations such as Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat. In this work, a canvas silkscreened with a conjunction of the advertising image for the 1982 film Tron and part of the headshot of the German blogger and cyber-hacker Boris Floricic (1972–1998) hangs at the top right corner of a larger field of latex paint applied directly to the wall. Floricic disappeared on October 17, 1998, and was found hanged from a waistbelt five days later in a Berlin park. Although the death was eventually ruled a suicide, the mysterious circumstances surrounding it, as well as Floricic’s hacking activities with regard to voice encryption and telephone systems, have led to numerous conspiracy theories. Both Trons are the perfect motif for Majerus’s larger interest in systems of political, technological, and artistic control: Tron the hacker devoted his life to unraveling intricate webs of government security and surveillance, particularly through the use of phone encryption, while Tron the movie concerns a protagonist who is transported into a computer mainframe and must find a passage out. Here, the Pantone color system that informs the choice of wall color depends on numerical codes for classification. It, along with the automated mode of silkscreen that was used to produce the canvas element, also serves to blur the lines of commercial and artistic practice at a time when the practice of painting itself as an aesthetic system was being called into question.