Jaime Pitarch's "The insistent persistence of failed horizons" reviewed by Jenny Wu on Artforum.

"Peering into the courtyard through the glass door at the rear of Spencer Brownstone Gallery, visitors to “The insistent persistence of failed horizons,” Jaime Pitarch’s fourth solo exhibition here—saw a white paperback suspended on either side by a pair of tautly drawn wires attached to C-clamps and hooked to two facing walls. Those who recognized the cover could tell it was a 2022 translation of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–85). Yet upon further inspection, one discovered that there were two volumes hanging, smushed together like schoolbooks at the bottom of a backpack—a part of Pitarch’s readymade Crosswords (all works cited, 2025). Because the second tome’s cover wasn’t visible from the door, viewers confronted an optical boundary that precluded full understanding. One could call this a “horizon,” which Nietzsche defined in his early writings as the perceptual and axiological limit to what one can know or believe at a given time, without which, the German philosopher argued, we would waste away in existential paralysis."

Read the full review here.