Jennifer Terzian Gallery is pleased to present a solo show of new paintings by New York based artist, Mike Picos. The opening reception will take place on Saturday, March 29 from 2-4pm.

CLOSED CIRCUIT is a suite of 9 paintings. Each painting’s surface is covered with an algorithmically generated maze with inlaid images drawn from the artist’s personal archive of digital artifacts. The solitary tree in Evergreen is a screen capture taken within a hardware emulator program running a Nintendo DS video game from the Pokémon franchise. Town and City contains a blocky, abstracted Main Street of colorful facades, sourced from an archive of ANSI graphics, 16-bit illustrations made in text editing software that were popular among users of online bulletin boards in the 90s. The suburban home with its clear blue sky and green grass setting in Single Family is clip art extracted from an outdated copy of WordPad, Microsoft’s defunct free word processing software.

The paintings in this series begin as a set of multi-layered, infinitely scalable vector graphics. Each graphic is sent to a plotter, which cuts a stencil its exact shape and dimensions, creating a pixel-perfect analog copy. While the forms in these paintings are nameable—tree, house, truck, robot—the processes used to render them point to the histories of hard-edge geometric abstraction, from Op-Art to Neo Geo. The physical properties of acrylic paint allow for the creation of dense, tactile surfaces, whose visible strata highlight the painting as a built object, in stark contrast to its immaterial digital origins.

The maze alludes to a process of searching at multiple orders of magnitude. The algorithm that generates the maze searches the grid cell-by-cell, constructing walls and passages as it progresses. A viewer engages in a similar searching process by finding their way to or from the embedded images, through the passageways and across the painting’s surface. It can be understood as the thing itself, a puzzle to be solved with the eye, or as a schematic for something at the scale of architecture to be traversed with one’s whole body. The maze can also be seen through time, as an abstraction of a narrative arc, with the disorienting twists, turns, and false starts that come before a resolution.

Mike Picos was born in New York, NY in 1991 and grew up in Fishkill, NY. He received a BFA in Studio Art from Cornell University and an MAT in Art Education from Queens College, CUNY. After completing his MAT, Picos worked as an art teacher at a public high school in NYC. In 2019, he co-founded RAD Group, an artist reading and discussion group, with artist Dan Fig, organizing monthly meetings and critiques. He received his MFA in Painting and Printmaking from the Yale School of Art in 2024.

Jennifer Terzian Gallery
3BB South Street
Litchfield, CT 06759

Jennifer Terzian Gallery