Contributed by Michael Brennan / “Vicissitudes of Nature” is the magisterial title of Jen Mazza’s first solo exhibition with Ulterior Gallery, and, given the calamitous start of 2025, her Cassandra-like premonitions could hardly be any timelier. Nearly two dozen paintings and works on paper occupy the top floor of the tin-tiled, pitched-ceilinged space. Deftly and seamlessly, Mazza uses a variety of techniques and strategies, appropriating images from multiple sources. The idea is to conflate them with important cultural signifiers while recontextualizing them into new narratives of interiority, as, say, Virginia Woolf did in her contemplation of “the waves” in her eponymous novel, quoted in the show.
To establish tone and scope, Mazza employs texts from various sources that are often cryptically witty.
Not all of Mazza’s humor is borrowed. Cast earpieces seem to beseech the viewer to listen more closely, but, because they’re visual renderings, they slyly implore us to look more closely as well.
The centerpiece of the show is the large painting Portent. This oceanic depiction of waves was lifted from the seemingly sparse central panel of Titian’s gargantuan 12-part woodcut The Submersion of the Pharaoh’s Army in the Red Sea, from 1515. The story, from Exodus, is about the drowning of Pharaoh’s army, Biblical persecutors vanquished by God. “Behold His mighty hand!” goes the familiar Hollywood refrain. Titian’s piece, which I’ve long admired, may look more like a Venetian lagoon than the Red Sea, yet he managed to recreate fluid motion with a forbiddingly rigid artistic procedure. Mazza’s isolation and enlargement of his crosshatched waves highlights their rhythm and, owing to her exclusion of the narrative, offers the viewer complete immersion. Portent also has the disarming quality of being a drawn painting – a copy of a copy of a copy.
A pair of photorealistic paintings, titled Suthina, round out the main group. These appear to be images of Etruscan tomb sculptures, lending the exhibition elegant gravity. Mazza’s painterly skills are in full evidence here. She has not rendered the paintings in a typically flat photorealist style. Instead, she has used thickly wrought impasto paint that mimics the sculptures’ sinewy metal surfaces, making them convincingly tactile and patinated.
The smaller back gallery includes a copy of a George Stubbs zebra painting, along with its excision or redaction, as well as a moody painting of pearls, small but masterly.
“Vicissitudes of Nature,” with its complex narrative interplay, is an exhibition worth mulling over. Embedded in deep time, it speaks eloquently to the contemporary via external and internal dialogue and painterly sleight-of-hand.
“Jen Mazza: Vicissitudes of Nature,” Ulterior Gallery, 424 Broadway, #601, New York, NY. Through February 22, 2025.
About the author: Michael Brennan is a Brooklyn-based abstract painter who writes on art.
Fabulous, looking forward to seeing. Fresh, and familiar at the same time.
Wonderful review wish I could see it. Thank you