Phosphenes
2023
Taking its title from the phenomenon of perceiving light without light entering the eye, Phosphenes marks a significant shift towards a more internalised and introspective territory within Mark Mangion's practice.
This new body of large-scale paintings explore perception, memory, psychological space, and material transformation through a subtle yet highly charged painterly processes.
Moving away from overtly documentary or socially constructed situations, Mangion turns his attention towards the conditions of seeing itself, proposing painting as a site where sensation, intuition, and reflection converge.
The works are composed of stark pictorial planes animated by translucent veils of colour that appear to hover across the surface of raw linen. Built through processes of layering, staining, puddling, bleeding, and transferring diluted pigments, the paintings emerge through a careful negotiation between control and contingency. Colour is allowed to migrate through the absorbent fabric, creating atmospheres that appear simultaneously deliberate and accidental. Rather than constructing images, Mangion creates conditions through which forms, traces, and relationships slowly materialise.
The physical act of painting is central to the work. Produced horizontally and approached from all sides, the paintings reject a predetermined orientation, existing instead as fluid and interchangeable fields of possibility. This method introduces a modular and polylithic quality, where individual works can be understood both autonomously and as components within a larger constellation. Fixed composition gives way to a more open and responsive process, allowing the paintings to evolve through a dialogue between gesture, material behaviour, and spatial awareness.
Importantly, Phosphenes resists directed narrative. The works offer no singular image or stable point of reference, instead occupying a territory of suspended meaning. Fragments emerge and dissolve; boundaries remain porous; surfaces oscillate between presence and absence. In this sense, the paintings function as liminal spaces, inhabiting the threshold between abstraction and suggestion, thought and sensation, memory and projection. What is depicted is less important than the conditions through which perception itself unfolds.
A phosphene is an internal image, a form of light generated by the body rather than the external world. Mangion's paintings similarly operate as manifestations of internal states. They do not describe landscapes, events, or narratives directly, yet they remain deeply connected to experiences of uncertainty, vulnerability, and psychological intensity. Their luminous surfaces evoke moments of emergence and disappearance, recalling fleeting impressions that exist on the edge of consciousness.
While profoundly personal in origin, the works also retain a broader political and existential resonance. Throughout his career, Mangion has explored the relationship between individual experience and larger social realities. In Phosphenes, these concerns are distilled into a quieter and more intimate language. The tensions that animate the paintings—between freedom and structure, chance and intention, presence and absence—mirror broader conditions of contemporary life. The surfaces become sites where internal and external worlds intersect, carrying traces of emotional, political, and psychological landscapes.
Ultimately, Phosphenes proposes painting as a space of pause and reflection within an increasingly accelerated world. These works do not seek resolution or certainty. Instead, they embrace vulnerability, ambiguity, and openness, inviting viewers into a sustained encounter with surface, time, and perception. Through their delicate balance of restraint and intensity, they offer a meditation on what remains visible when narrative falls away and attention turns inward, towards the fragile and luminous spaces through which meaning first begins to emerge.
