mountain revisited

In Mazal’s current White Mountain (2025) series, 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. If Kailash is the black mountain, the White Mountain series consists of after images, reversed on the retina of the mind’s eye, in a dialectical dance with possibility. Indeed, the echo of certain deep black passages from the black mountain paintings arise here in white to float like ghosts or prayer flags criss-crossing your field of vision, or as memories of the sacred mountain. Mountains rise in the slowest motion just like sea foam breaks in memory in a vanishing moment. Wind whips the snow across barren black bedrock faces and at an entirely different velocity Mount Kailash is reversed, re-spiraled, reduced to white sands in the sea. The new White Mountain paintings beautifully flip the figure ground of the Mount Kailash images in a black/white yin and yang that is a constant in Mazal’s approach. Pieces of colour break through like sudden hope.

Jon Carver