A Bascove interviews painter Jen Mazza whose exhibition Graft is on view at Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York through April 12, 2014.
Mazza comments: "In the paintings, the formalist reproductions are represented still circumscribed within the rectangle of the page, which, with its dog-eared corners or other signs of age serves both to enclose the image and to push it back in time. In this way the images seem to remain in a citational form, as quotations of an original. Though initially, through the process of painting, I really do inhabit these works as a maker, when this layer is complete I subvert the images by overlapping my own interventions: geometric shapes — and constructivist forms as you mentioned; an organic shape quoted from a Moholy-Nagy painting or a red oval taking its color palette from a Liubov Popova painting — add to these the formal compositional elements of written language: punctuation, parentheses, asterisks and so on."