Review~ Michael Mazurek

Michael Mazurek "Triptych" 2016. photo by Kevin Todora
Michael Mazurek “Triptych” 2016. photo by Kevin Todora

Michael Mazurek
“New Paintings”
BEEFhaus, Dallas [link]

Mounting appropriated doors as painting smacks of post-modern irony: a high-modernist parody: a conceptual-minimalist “fuck you” to a system that revels in cleverness. Nonchalantly distressed by nonstandard usage the panels bear scars and lackadaisical attempts at concealment. If personified it is tragic, begging acute angles of painterly inspection, as though appreciation of casual violence against objects parallels social insight. However, if the surface is catagorically accepted it presents an improbable poetry: inaccessible and of higher authenticity than meditated actions. The piece, unwillingly, exemplifies the noumena gap, questioning our occasional correlationism at odds with our systemic un-knowing of daily life.

~ Ryder Richards
photography by Kevin Todora, courtesy of the artist