Over the years, through its repeated appearances in film, hacker culture, gaming, and digital finance, the name TRON has accumulated a notable cultural and aesthetic charge. The exhibition TRON at the Michel Majerus Estate presents ten works from Michel Majerus’s distinctive eponymous series (1999), marking the first large-scale presentation since they debuted in the exhibition as soon as possible at Gió Marconi Gallery in Milan nearly three decades ago. A collaborative project by Daniel Birnbaum and Jacqui Davies, the exhibition TRON constructs a speculative environment in which cinematic interventions become a framework for a layered reading of Michel Majerus’s work.

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Two video collages by Jacqui Davies introduce a moving image dimension that extends and complicates the visual field, reinforced by a reflective wall. The artist’s former studio is transformed into a spatial index of the network of references underlying the Tron works.

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The large monochrome color fields of the Tron works are painted directly onto the wall in bright hues drawn from the Pantone palette. In the upper right corner of each, a silkscreen print is mounted, juxtaposing a promotional image from the Disney film TRON (1982) with a cropped portrait of the Berlin hacker Boris Floricic, who used the pseudonym TRON. The sequential numbering in the titles of the works, the Pantone color codes and the serially produced screen prints evoke technical manufacturing processes that, in combination with the abstract color fields, challenge the conventional notion of painting. At the same time, the motifs evoke tech subcultures, cinematic imagination, digital gaming worlds, and their grounding in reality. The serial conception and the spatially expansive installation generate a dense field of tension in which references circulate as a distinct and processual material.

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Majerus’s artistic practice has long been a point of inquiry for Daniel Birnbaum: From his early review of Majerus’s exhibition Space Safari (1997) at Anders Tornberg Gallery in Stockholm, to their 2002 collaboration on Sozialpalast, the site-specific installation that temporarily covered Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate with the image of Schöneberg’s Pallasseum housing complex, Birnbaum situated Majerus’s practice within the “expanded field” of painting, where it operates simultaneously as painting, installation, sculpture, and architecture.

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The exhibition TRON highlights moving image, gaming, and digital systems as further integral aspects of Majerus’s artistic logic. TRON offers a multidimensional experience which opens the artist’s practice to new dialogues, presenting the works as points of convergence for cultural, temporal, visual, theoretical and affective narratives.