“What remains is not an absent figure but an intensified figure.”

For his Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse series, Filipino-American artist Paul Pfeiffer mines the archives of the NBA to find photographs to digitally manipulate, removing contextual details in a process he refers to as ‘camouflaging.’ The central figure of Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (27) sits solitarily behind the free throw line, facing away from the basket and towards an onlooking crowd of spectators. With all his competitors, advertising logos, and scoreboards digitally removed from the photo, the player’s purpose and fate eerily is left ominous and uncertain. Through this decontextualization, Pfeiffer depicts his pro player a sort of icon to the crowd, though the athlete may not have been the central figure of the original scene. In his anonymity, the player becomes a commentary on the status of professional basketball players in the American media landscape: “They have such a commercial, monetizable status in society and, at the same time, are totally interchangeable, totally dispensable… The simple act of erasing their name and number renders (them) anonymous.”

In these photographs, Pfeiffer appropriates the series title from Dürer’s woodcut print of the same name, which depicts the scene from the Book of Revelation. Citing Dürer’s influence as an innovator in the field of figural representation, “I really like the combination of a title that conjures up the history of the evolution of the figure study and at the same time a suggestion of a kind of larger epic occurring, having to do with some kind of dramatic ending or shifting.” The biblical title further refers to the spectacle of basketball itself, a game which Pfeiffer suggests is watched as intently as an apocalyptic scene. Here, Pfeiffer’s isolated player becomes a subject of worship or martyrdom: a god, an angel, a saint.