Sliding Into Entropy

Maria Kozak, The Great Passage (detail), 2025. Oil and acrylic on jute. 15 x 12 in. Photos courtesy the artists and Dreamsong.

 

Maria Kozak’s exhibition, Passages, drips with the pain of transformation and merges with the stunningly surreal. There is a somber isolation about the figures. Their bodies are slumped, holding the weight of the space above. Each vignette an eerie calm before the hypothetical storm, Kozak’s paintings outline a moment of listlessness amidst the sublime.

Kozak begins each piece on her iPad, with the drawing program Procreate. Folding in previous work and favorable color palettes, Kozak works to push and pull the past lives of her paintings until new forms emerge. She makes intuitive yet arbitrary decisions, blending up to 100 layers at a time. Kozak alters the hue, saturation, and color balance, and then stretches and reconfigures the images. She says she is “always collaborating with the machine," which results in a smearing of reality, a middle space that contains both form and formlessness. Kozak says "leaving room for some novelty," leads to outcomes that are often accidental.

Projecting these collage-like images onto the canvas, Kozak marks up an outline of the shapes, then begins painting. Layers of burlap or linen are primed as part of the canvas, adding texture and color, as can be seen on the surface of The Blueprint. In a pareidolic fashion, Kozak discovers new characters while painting. She detects figures in the form, and milks their expression. Developing these impulses and allowing the emerging figures to be perceived, the ambiguous subjects within each work give the viewer something to grasp onto amidst a liquifying landscape. As in The Great Passage or Faithful In Small Things, there is a curiosity about the figures and the relationships at hand.

Maria Kozak, Faithful in Small Things, 2025. Oil on jute. 15 x 12 in. 

 

Within the melting scenes, there’s an undercurrent of duality, a concurring presence of "darkness and light, calm and chaos, and movement and stillness." A folding screen or room divider, titled The Map is not the Territory, more obviously illustrates that duality. With “one side control, one side chaos," the audience is reminded that a map, though often prescriptive, is ever-evolving and merely marks one moment in time. The flip side of the screen is more fractured, marking a positioning within disorder.

Kozak moved from Poland to the United States when she was three years old. She reflects on Polish art and its dark introspection, and imagines in what ways her work is tied to it. Taking a look at The Healing and A Room Made of Sky, there's a pull and distortion reminiscent of Edvard Munch’s work, as well as German Expressionism. 

Maria Kozak, The Healing, 2025. Oil on jute. 30 x 24 inches.

 

“The world you’re showing us, it’s like you’re removing the veil of structure and solidity," noted Shana Kaplow, fellow artist and moderator of the September 6th opening reception conversation. Kozak’s figures are compelled to face the slithering truth of uncertainty. Passages as a whole prods at questions of existence and memory, and the work is both disorientingly resonant and weighty because it does not forget affliction.

Day After Day

Each painting acting as a touch tree, Rema Ghuloum’s daily, ritualistic practice provides a documentation of time and presence. In her series Day after Day, Ghuloum welcomes the viewer into lapses of tension and release, and lapses of additive abandon balanced by mindful deduction.

In each painting, there is a layering and stratification of information. She starts all paintings in a series simultaneously. With each piece laid horizontally on the floor, she pours acrylic gouache onto the canvases via buckets, spray bottles, or squeeze bottles.

“It’s really about trying to create different speeds, and an active ground with a specific palette," Ghuloum says. Treating the material like watercolor, she starts manipulating the surface by tilting the canvases and disturbing the material.

Rema Ghuloum, Awakening. 48 x 54 inches.

 

In a piece like Awakening, residue from this initial stage of pouring can be spotted. Up to this point in a given work, Ghuloum has worked fairly swiftly, but at this stage she begins to slow, assessing what foundation exists in each piece.

Ghuloum revisits the paintings every day, and at the end of each day’s session, she applies whatever dregs of paint are left on the palette to the edge of the canvas, tallying and archiving the considered colors. 

Because of the way Ghuloum archives the palette’s history onto the border of each piece, there is a funneling of attention into the painting, and the border can be deciphered like a score or legend to see the sequence in which the painting was made.

“The edges reinforce the fact that they’re just paintings, and I’m always thinking about this play. There’s a contrast, like discordance, it's not this and it’s not that," Ghuloum says. "You can come closer and a whole world is revealed, and come further away and see that it’s an object.” This pulling, tugging sensation can be experienced with a piece like Facade (shadow), where the viewer’s vision is tunneled toward the center of the piece. There is a natural flow, or current, inward.

 

Rema Ghuloum, Facade (shadow), 17 x 23 inches.

 

Mimicking the physical process of entropy, sanding is an instrumental part of Ghuloum’s painting process. Once each layer of paint is dry, she hand sands the entire canvas with a fine-grit sandpaper. 

“My hand is physically in it and it also removes one very thin layer of the surface, and what that does is it makes a memory or a history in the painting," she says. "They start communicating something that feels like involuntary memory.”

Ghuloum is a Reiki practitioner and accustomed to the hands-on nature of healing. Sanding is a way of treating the whole surface the same, like a body, while also steering the topography of each piece. Reaching a place of equanimity, presence, and temporality, sanding requires a detachment to what layer is painted onto the surface. She says her “process is the parameter, and everything else is open,” which means coming back to the ritual action of sanding provides an anchor within the intuitive landscape of her work.

 

Rema Ghuloum, Facade (2am).

 

Looking at pieces such as Facade (7am), Facade (pink), and Facade (2am), history undoubtedly asserts itself on the canvas, but the days in the studio have melded alongside the paint, and time has become indiscernible.

"My paintings often look really ethereal, and a lot of times people write about my work in that way, but when you look at them up close, they’re coarse, and there’s a felt grittiness to them,” she says.

Color and surface build the foundation for Ghuloum’s work, yet each painting is an energetic memorial, and an abstraction that is felt. Getting lost in liminality whilst remaining grounded, Ghuloum’s practice is one of commitment, and of ritualistically making her mark. But ultimately, it’s one of allowing for coalescence, and then allowing for letting go. ◼︎ 

Maria Kozak's Passages and Rema Ghuloum's Day After Day are on view at Dreamsong through October 25. Gallery hours: Wed-Sat 12-5pm or by appointment.