Ryan Mrozowski: Still Life as an Experiment in Seeing

Just as Cézanne used apples to reinvent the act of painting, Ryan Mrozowski chooses ordinary subjects to question the way we see. His paintings, featured in his first solo exhibition with Perrotin, begin with fruit, flowers, and natural forms, transforming them into tools for perceptual investigation. Nothing in his work is truly immediate. Through repetition, doubling, and symmetry, Mrozowski constructs images that hover between figuration and abstraction, prompting viewers to reconsider what they think they recognize. In his diptychs, the two panels function like collaborating eyes in binocular vision: the image is reassembled in the mind, revealing hidden structures and unexpected patterns. Painting thus becomes a site of dialogue between art and cognitive science. Technical precision coexists with a sense of instability. Invisible grids emerge only through careful looking, while seemingly decorative forms acquire increasing complexity. The artist invites viewers to slow down, to linger before the image, allowing the act of seeing itself to become part of the work. Mrozowski’s research does not aim to tell stories, but to make the mechanisms of perception visible. In a visual landscape dominated by speed, his painting reasserts the value of attention and discovery, showing how even a still life can contain the full richness of human experience.