It’s tiles and textiles. Geometry in cursive. It’s a spree of patterns, scrambling over top of
each other and butting in line. Patterns interrupted and interrupting. Which is funny
because that is, of course, precisely what patterns are not supposed to do.
It’s abstraction with a little a—as in removed, isolated from an original context. Drawn
from Deco or Constructivism, from a scrap of fabric or the inside of an envelope.
Transposed here in a cartoon collage. It’s a patchwork of decorative digressions.
It’s a risky investment for boys on the move. Mark Joshua Epstein has gone to Mexico.
For months all we hear are rumors of a turn to watercolor.
It’s what they print on the inside of envelopes to obstruct prying eyes, a security pattern.
An aestheticizing of the tucked away and unseen. Blanketing the gallery walls, it suggests
an unlikely kinship with Jasper Johns’s crosshatch pattern but also an envelope torn apart
and inside out.
It’s a gleeful confusion of interior and exterior. In and out of the histories of modernism.
In and out of the house. The domestic and the architectural. All converging across
surfaces that are casually manic, happily overcrowded.
Wrong turns and abrupt changes, disappearances and reappearances. Intricacies run cold
into a studied unsteady line. They resurface. Mark Joshua Epstein is back from Mexico
bearing pale colored reflections of the great murals and tiling of the capital.
-Eli Diner