The Brooklyn Rail

Henry Mandell knows the subsurface teems with vitality. In his debut exhibition at Anita Rogers Gallery, the painter draws upon the interconnected qualities of mycelium as a grounding agent for a remarkable body of work. Mycelium is the fungal network of thread-like structures that ramify and interlace a thousand-fold connection to the roots of trees and other vegetation in forests. For Mandell, there is a strong analogy between the mycelial system and the world wide web. The artist’s recent body of work capitalizes on the exploration of this interconnectedness.

There is not a wall that isn’t put to use in the gallery, though the exhibition does not feel overhung. This is because the paintings maintain a steady energetic level that gives the show an even tone, regardless of the different material characteristics of the artworks. Mandell’s colors operate on equal wavelengths: wherever they fall on the spectrum, their lightness and brightness remain consistent. It’s a necessary containment, as Mandell’s line work is supremely expansive and multilayered.

The title of the exhibition corresponds with two of the paintings in the show. A pair of rectangular works, Superunknown 36 F and Superunknown 35 Q (both 2023), depicts a colorful sphere above backgrounds that suggest fabric patterns. The sphere in Superunknown 36 F is warm; its partner is cool. Both bear some resemblance to balls of yarn, but whereas such a ball represents potential—something to be made—Mandell’s spheres represent something being pulled apart. I wouldn’t know it from looking, but each line has unraveled a letter, and the letters once formed legible words and sentences that presumably told a story. Those glyphs communicate differently now.

Three paintings manipulate the language of Satoshi Nakamoto’s text, “The Bitcoin White Paper” (2008), which described a form of monetary exchange that would not rely upon central banks but would instead spread across a linked group of computers. The linked group is massive, and like mycelium, its interconnectedness is absolute. These paintings exemplify the super-flat aesthetic that Mandell puts to good use throughout the show. Lines bend and merge as they do on flight maps, but the gravity of the painting is distinct. There is a verticality that emerges in the compositions, an upward movement like an air column in which Nakamoto’s text is reconfigured.

When the vertical axis is built with lines that don’t twist, the composition suggests a screen or a curtain. Mandell realizes four paintings—one blue, one pink, one grey, one brown—in this manner, each with the same rectangular dimensions. The lines in these works are stretched letters taken from poems—Walt Whitman in one case, Emily Dickinson in another—though as in all of Mandell’s work, the source texts are obscured to such illegibility that the information they impart is completely obscured. The blue painting, Plumb 36C (2022), has a terrific optical quality generated by the contrast between dark and light shades carefully interwoven.

A third text the artist has manipulated originated in literature on the mind and in this instance, Mandell made two works that share a common form: the mighty equilateral triangle. Titled Theory of Mind 040 and Theory of Mind 018 (both 2023), these paintings center upon triangles pointed downwards, two dimensional pyramids with their tips aimed at the ground instead of the sky. Because they bring one’s thoughts to the interworking of one’s thoughts, they enable a cyclical conceptual experience. This corresponds directly with the title of the exhibition, Superunknown, which Mandell borrowed from the band Soundgarden, which took its name from an artwork. As with mycelium, connections abound.

Behind the front desk are two beautiful ink drawings that depict masses of branching filaments overlaid upon neat grids. The grids are drawn in graphite and disappear as one recedes from the work. This recession is what happens to the meaning of the texts as Mandell distorts their physical substance in his paintings. Such radical ways of engaging the written word enable new relationships to form amongst rhetorical units otherwise set in pre-existing patterns. If these patterns represent the surface of what we experience, Mandell shows that what lies beneath is an animated entanglement, full of life.