Mezvinsky appropriates antiquated historical and allegorical imagery – the latter a time-worn vehicle for translation – in his paintings and cut-out works on paper. Pastoral landscapes reminiscent of Toile de Jouy, early Dutch master paintings, and commedia dell’arte characters figure recurrently as they are carefully deconstructed and re-contextualized in Mezvinsky’s hands, partially erased and re-assigned yet another layer of meaning within the artist’s visual lexicon.

One approach to this careful breaking down and reconstituting of history is what the artist terms ‘sculptural drawing’: a technique of decompressing the picture plane by cutting out the fore, mid, and backgrounds of delicate albeit densely detailed drawings and re-composing them like a three-dimensional collage. Within the installations Dietro Liceo, Davanti Museo (2013) and A Good Day (2013/15) each framed element becomes a discrete theater of intricate paper cut-outs, stacked one in front of the other to create ethereal telescoping landscapes. Both the set of Il Fazzoletto, an operetta staged in 2011 at the Performance Art Institute, San Francisco, and Human Cave: Shadow of restoration hang obscured above (2015), a recreation of a Vietnamese cave composed of 58 manipulated X-Rays, engulf the spaces they hang in. These works suggest that history is not consolidated and safely preserved in the past, but that its layers extend into the future. In A Moveable Feast (2011), five large-scale drawings are framed on rolling structures akin to those that carry chalkboards. Arranged in a vertebral sequence they conspire to produce a uniform image, yet side by side they offer a different narrative. The verso of each screen features a crude connective illustration that runs through the five pieces, telling its own independent story. In all of these works the viewer is encouraged to move through and around the typically two-dimensional, and to viscerally discover that there is literally more than meets the eye when perceiving the flattened image head-on.

Effectively, translation could be understood as the constant act of erasing and redefining. In Most Uncommon Ideas Could Be Right (2015), a portrait by Karl Stark of his blind wife executed in broad impasto strokes hangs next to an animated projection of the painting in which Mezvinsky gradually effaces the subject’s head and activates select patches of color so they appear to flow like a current of water against an otherwise static image, at once questioning the possibility of “still-life” and highlighting yet again the distinct layers of meaning that contribute to its illusion. Frida: removing residue with respectful silence (2015) similarly challenges the ways in which familiarity and the immediate perception of the two-dimensional image obscures more nuanced readings of its subject’s identity and history. An animated video portrait of an illustrated Frida Kahlo stares directly at the viewer as her most famous identifier, the unibrow, is slowly erased and replaced by a commedia dell’arte mask.

These playfully recall Derrida’s concept of sous rature or ‘under erasure’. Originally developed by Heidegger, sous rature denotes the crossing out of a word in a text while allowing it to remain legible to signal the inadequacy of inherited language while also recognizing its inevitability. In the philosophy of deconstruction, this practice also seeks to demonstrate that meaning is derived from difference and not reference to pre-existing ideas.

‘Fabrications’ (2006-2011), a body of figurative textile works, interprets canonical paintings and painterly motifs in a sumptuous assemblage of fabrics. Here a material translation occurs, dissecting the picture plane and faithfully re-composing it in layers of opaque textiles that form a tactile, sculptural surface. In Translation so no one relates…(2015), an installation comprising 24 paintings on loosely stretched on somber earthen-toned silks and cottons, the draped clothes featured in old masters drawings are reproduced and float on the canvas, devoid of the bodies that define their shape, forcing the viewer to mentally complete the image.

Cervantes once said translation from one language to another is like looking at Flemish tapestries on the wrong side. Mezvinsky seems to suggest that it is closer to looking at tapestries from all sides, even the insides. That no one way is wrong, but none can ever be exactly right either.

Mezvinsky’s work has been exhibited in many locations including The Jewish Museum Vienna, The Hirshhorn Collection (Washington DC), Brot Kunsthalle (Vienna), and Tiroler Landesmuseum Ferdinandeum (Innsbruck) as well private collections.