The emergence of these new images was triggered by the recent call by the Society of Hungarian Painters (Magyar Festők Társasága) for submissions to their semi-annual juried exhibition, this time themed as Mirror (Tükör).

The images of this latest double-sided diptych painting take a detour from the Split Commentary Revisited Series (here), themselves an ongoing remake of a much earlier series, the 2010 Big Series Paintings.

In these Tükör images, my response to the concept of Mirror was purely visual: beginning with a digitally manipulated mirroring and re-assemblage of the vertical halves of all original eight Form Without Commentary Tracings (here). First the left half was combined with it’s mirror-image, then the same with the right half. The altered Split Commentary Schematics (here) pointed towards which mirrored form to choose for this piece.

My initial reaction to these emergent symmetrical, Rorschach-like forms was strongly negative – symmetry apparently troubles me. Armed with that knowledge, I resisted the impulse to back off, instead pursuing these demon-like forms with greater interest. I knew that the process of painting, staining, flipping and pressing would take over as the work progressed; that the mirroring would in the end be the result of those processes and that the fixed, literal nature of the disturbing line tracings would be replaced by the fluid voices of the paint itself.

– Diane Sophrin