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All art is an act of translation.
Consider how Henri Matisse translated one thing into something totally different and changed art history.
This was a textile with blue leaves and flower baskets on a pale background.
Some of his greatest early masterpieces feature thetoile de Jouy.
Thus this plain abstract decorative fabric helped him rupture the fabric of art history.
These sources include old art magazines, ads for gallery exhibitions, and picture books.
Shapes liquify, wobble, and congeal into new configurations whose connection to the original object is almost unrecognizable.
All these different things become refracted through the prism of his sensibility; they become his.
Mullen is autistic and nonspeaking.
I met him once; he had the quiet intensity of the Rock of Gibraltar.
There is a constant push and pull between known and unknown.
Some paintings look like cloud configurations; others are oceans floating with intricate fragments and bits of text.
It is remarkable that so many of these images are based on the covers ofArtforumandArt in America.
Art magazines are such sexy, shiny objects, fetishizing both art and artists.
Mullen subverts their glossy appeal and in so doing reconstructs their content.
The lower left corner is an exaggerated barcode like a crosswalk with an $8.00 price tag.
In another painting, Mullens source image came as a shock to me.
(The gallery hands out a selection of source images for anyone who asks.)
Mullen gives us a thick geometric abstraction: a horizontal gray rectangular band beneath three vertical rectangles.
It looks like a 1970s post-minimalist reduction.
The image turns out to be a magazine article on film displaying four photographs.
The words ARTnews tip us off that this is a magazine.
The source is a de Kooning portrait of a seated woman.
you might make out the head and hair, the yellow dress, and a flesh-colored chair.
He strips away the propaganda.
In his hypersensitive way, he renders the secret visual regions found in these objects.
As with all great acts of translation, Mullens methods may be unknowable to us.
But his optical world is a magnifying glass of internal experiences as finely focused and original as any artists.
