Mongol Messenger Arts and Culture
Growing up in a multi ethnic and very political family in New York and Philadelphia, combined with his time working and studying abroad, Andrew Margolies Mezvinsky infuses his work with an intriguingly diverse set of devices. Beginning from a very classical American visual vocabulary, scenes of suburban America, postcard photography, and motel visions of lighthouses, the lines of his images become blurred into images of twisted grotesque beasts and distorted humans.
These surrealisms succeed in making the viewer question the roles of illusion, perception, and expectation in art not through their forms, but through the various fabrics that Mesvinsky paints on. In ìI knew I was never going to be a professional bull fighter . . .,î images rendered in high contrast are painted on heavily textured fabric, which viewed separately reads as very flat. The viewer is reminded that the illusory depth given to the fabricís surface by the paint is just that: illusion. As viewers we are presented with both truths and have to make our own conscious decisions to flip between the two understandings of what our eyes are seeing. The issue of how our eyes are tricked into depth is taken to a new limit with ìOh, Just Please dont take that turn to negative town.î Here we stare at a landscape of red rocks and a stop sign painted on red velvet, forcing us to read a piece of printed fabric lain on top of the velvet as the distant sky. However, given that this fabric is patterned with pictures of the United States of America and is clearly physically in front of the landscape, our mindís innate desire to read it differently becomes blatantly ridiculous.
In other places the fabrics become sculpture as folds create dramatic lines of light and shadow that interact with and compliment the spectral painted forms. As swathes of cloth are draped over and breaking free of the canvas, it brings the rectangularity of the painting back to the forefront of our minds. It is a detail that the ubiquity of the shape has made us forget. In ìStep on my head while I am drowning, what a great friend,î a sea scene with only the slightest surreal touch on closer inspection reveals itself to be a play on surfaces and paint. Two human faced lighthouses with a sky filled with an ambient light are painted in wispy strokes, however the towers sit on pieces of camouflaged fabric which have in turn been camouflaged with more paint to pass as hills at first glance. The rolling sea below is a mass of twisted denim. Despite the bizarre medium, the depiction is spot on, teasing us to reconsider whether yellow and white pigments are so natural a choice to represent the luminous sky, the medium we immediately accept. The physicality of these sculptural elements makes it more difficult to dismiss the paintings as a window to some merely imagined space. They are real objects with three dimensions, which invade our space.
By deconstructing conventions of paintings that aim to be invisible, his works describe the difficulties in separating truth from perception. They push the vocabulary of surrealism to include not just the juxtaposition of reality and fantasy, but also the truth of how our visual senses and minds filter our information. Through these works we learn that there is nothing stranger than how we perceive our world.
-Xander CM Piper