Mark Masyga, Quodlibet

Front Room Gallery is pleased to present “Quodlibet,” a solo exhibition of paintings by artist Mark Masyga on view at our new location in Hudson, NY (727 Warren Street) .  This is Masyga’s fifth solo show with the gallery and features a series of new, large-scale abstract oil paintings. The exhibition title references the notion of a musical composition of a lighthearted medley of well-known tunes; it is also defined as a topic for philosophical or theological discussion.  Both meanings serve as ways to consider the insertion of text into the abstract compositions of the new work on view.  In these most recent paintings, partial words, letterforms, and flourishes, such as serifs, intermingle with the linear brushstroke and non-referential forms. The hierarchy of the line-work and layers is conflated with the characters, which are often obscured to the point where they may not even be acknowledged, or recognized only when viewed for a period of time.  The overall result is an illusionistic depth of non-deterministic linear contours, shapes, and brushstrokes that have combined to create a new language of interacting glyphs and forms.

The recent appearance of text and pseudo letterforms is the result not only of Masyga’s evolving mark making but also of childhood memories and his interest in audio collages.  The random, quick-cut found in re-listening to the collages influence the work figuratively and now literally. The reliance on chance (mediated by editing) gets to the heart of the work; the painting titles reflect this in their wordplay.  Combining sometimes random words (and marks) together, then making changes, is similar to audio editing, and hopefully just as entertaining. 

Masyga’s complex color palette furthers this reference to a seemingly playful manner of composition, when in fact it is well considered, balanced in chroma and hue.  Selected forms of relative tint and tone nearly fuse with the neutral background to give a feeling of a great distance between those and the more saturated color shapes that rise to the foreground. Opposing colors and their tangency to each other create a simultaneous contrast that distorts the visual perception of depth. The final compositions present myriad points of contemplation where color and line intersect, with the voids between the visual elements being just as active.

Mark Masyga (MFA, School of the Art Institute of Chicago) has held residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and the Edward F. Albee Foundation. He lives and works in New York City.