SUPPORTICO LOPEZ

Post horns are a precursor to trumpets, but have no valves, and appear in some of Thomas Rowlandson’s drawings from the late 18th and turn of the 19th centuries. Valved trumpets were not developed until the 1820s. Post horns were used by towns and villages to let the residents know when the post had arrived, hence it’s use as a logo for Deutsche Post and the world’s largest mail and courier company use it as well. Nowadays they tend to be used mostly for decorative purposes as they are largely obsolete, both in music and as a means of alerting people. So the artist wanted to further distance them from their original use by turning them into paintings.

The horn sculptures are all casts of crushed post horns (and the small one is from an old car horn) which the artist bought on Ebay. He had the brass horns crushed in a hydraulic press: 100 tons of pressure is put onto them, and it flattens them. Then the artist made silicone mould of them, into which he cast the horns with acrylic paint and tinted jesmonite, reinforcing with nylon mesh. Some of the paint is cast into the mould and some is added after the cast has come out of the mould.