Continuing an ongoing dialogue between Nick Mauss and Megan Francis Sullivan, likenesses is the first time their works are presented in direct conversation. Two distinct attitudes pose questions with regard to the orientation of the viewer.

Painting on the underside of sheets of glass that are subsequently silvered, Mauss captures an estranged line inside the resulting mirror—a line that is entangled with the spatial reality of its changeable reflections and a hyper-awareness of one’s own gaze. In this process of built-in delays, shifts, and reversals, the work arises as a fluid framing of the field of vision, interposed by layers.

Sullivan’s ‘Bathers (Inverted)’ reiterate Paul Cézanne’s figural landscape paintings at 1:1 scale in exacting colour negative, inciting a strange cognitive reflex: the works oscillate between their rendered inversion and imagined “positive”. Not merely analytical takes, they assert a painterly vitality containing both presence and absence.

These destabilizing maneuvers yield a surprising lushness as they locate and then pierce what Hubert Damisch has identified as “a zero that is not synonymous with the original.”

At Atrata, Mauss’ and Sullivan’s works converse across two sites – the radically spare Chapelle St. Croix in Angles-sur-l’Anglin, for which Mauss has created a large-scale reverse-painted mirrored mural, and the more intimate Villa Atrata, where Sullivan’s “Bathers” confront the omnipresent view of the landscape. The works sensitize dimensions of gesture and touch, and, as the poet Susan Stewart has observed, “touch, like dizziness, is a threshold activity—subjectivity and objectivity come quite close to one another.”