Ryan Mrozowski »Interleaf«

The new series of Split Paintings, like his earlier Pair paintings, separate elements from a single picture plane over two panels. That which is present in the one is "blank" (monochrome) in the other. Overlayed they would make a complete image. In the Split Paintings the panels of the diptych touch and are arranged so the motif's left and right edges meet in register to form a coalesced image. The result is a dislocated motif which nevertheless meets in a cohesive totality; a brainteaser which also exists on its own ambiguous terms in a tradition of abstract painting.

In Mrozowski's practice that which sometimes the eye deduces without too much effort eludes simple description in writing, and other times vice versa. This is a key to Mrozowski's approach. His works challenge translation between vision and cognition. What am I seeing here?

This is nowhere as un/clear as in the new suite of exquisite silver gelatin prints. Titled Untitled (Interleaf), each of these delicate images captures a projected image cast upon a physical still life, causing the flat projection of a book to break apart across the topography of an actual book. The layered, initially confounding image disentangles itself under scrutiny.

In works that are brazenly painterly and flourish in their formal qualities of colour and form, Mrozowski simultaneously explores the interrelationships of vision, pattern, interpretation, and logic. In a matrix of touchpoints that extend beyond art history, his work evokes the cognitive dissonance of René Magritte, but also the literary constraints and experimental play of Georges Perec and the Oulipo group, the pioneering pattern recognition puzzles of Mikhail Bongard, reCaptcha, and by implication the machine learning of Alan Turing and AI.