A slightly dark charm permeates the images of Ryan Mrozowski, a young Brooklyn-based painter showing at Daniel Weinberg. Things occur just beyond the scope of logic or in quantities that crowd out reason. There is no security in numbers, only a compounded curiousness.
In one of the modest-sized paintings, what seem like too many gleaming yellow windows punctuate the dark silhouette of an oversized house, like inescapable eyes in a haunted tale. In another, Mrozowski paints a huge heap of chairs in a retro palette of rich earthy browns, glowing amber, ivory and pale blue, coyly titling the piece "Chairpile (From Now On We Will Have to Stand)."
Mrozowski stages sober jokes, odd assemblies. One resembles a dog show, but alongside the large black pets on curtained platforms stand several identical men with raised batons, as if conducting. Realities collapse in tableau after tableau. The carnivalesque meets the athletic, which collides with the academic. Gravity competes against the absurd.
What also lifts the work from the merely cartoonish is Mrozowski's gorgeous sense of color and his seductively smooth, streaky surfaces. With their brownish casts, the paintings seem to wear a veil of authenticity, a varnish of authority that gives their humor some depth.
- Leah Ollman, LA Times review, Nov 14th, 2008