mountain revisited

Mazal’s White Mountain (2025) series emerged from a desire to revisit past techniques and inspirations while embracing digital experimentation — a “series in which he revisits the oil paint application that accounts for the incredibly rich figure–ground ambiguities and monumental pictorial power of the Mount Kailash and Kora series, but this time by way of contrast reversal,” as writer Jon Carver notes. Though many years have passed since Mazal’s journey to the sacred Mount Kailash in Tibet, the striking images of the mountain continued to fascinate him. While digitally manipulating his Full Circle K Paintings — his most recent reference to the Tibetan landmark — Mazal inverted their black brushstrokes to white, symbolically returning to the snow. Jon Carver writes, “If Kailash is the black mountain, the White Mountain series consists of afterimages, reversed on the retina of the mind’s eye, in a dialectical dance with possibility.”

He then layered these transformed elements over the vibrant, angular compositions of his Praga paintings, effectively collaging two distinct series into one. The decision during the process of digital collage was not only a visual one but also one that symbolically ties together two sites at different ends of the world but connected by themes of burial and profound faith and spirituality.