Front Room Gallery is proud to present a solo exhibition of paintings by Mark Masyga. This new series of work is informed by natural and man-made disasters and hovers indeterminately between landscape and abstraction. Mark Masyga embraces and incorporates the concept of the “Ruins Feeling” by Midas Dekkers, an emotion that occurs as a mixture of sadness, excitement and curiosity in the sight of decay. There is both an inevitability, and a beauty to decay, which Mark has captured in his paintings.

Masyga’s under-painting and backgrounds contain forms that relate to vestiges of architecture and civilization turned to rubble. Building foundations of tone and form, Mark references deterioration and the natural de-evolution from order to disorder. This serves as a jumping-off point, as each painting develops, the composition is considered from every angle, producing a sense of disorientation and a feeling of the uncanny.

Masyga has long documented construction sites, commenting on their aesthetics and beauty along with their temporary nature. Mark sees the arrested development at these sites as an indicator of the economy’s near collapse, seeing the refuse and abandoned construction materials through the lens of ruins. However, Mark Masyga’s paintings neutralize feelings of nostalgia associated to ruination, abstracting this point reference, celebrating a fundamental loss of orientation.