John Hurrell – 3 April, 2026

In these projects Zac Langdon-Pole’s jigsaw artistry is focused on what I’d call surrealist subject matter created in large ‘paintings’ where weird imagistic juxtapositions result from the blending of the various unexpected sources which the blended (two or more) jigsaws quote. The show’s heading seems to obliquely reference Lewis Carroll.

You might argue the results are similar to, say, mixing shuffled verbal phrases from the long titles referred to, but this is visual art, not literature. The pleasure comes from the strange resulting illustrations: the ocular catalysts that wildly provoke the imagination. Not juxtaposed articulated phrases.

This overlaying or butting-together creates a strange startling type of beauty where recognizable images (via different overlaid planes) are shuffled around to play peekaboo (through ‘windows’) in a way that keeps you guessing. Their frozen stasis and odd mixing allow unforeseen mental pleasures to emerge. Recalled memories of quite varied, earlier, exhibitions for example.

Plus there are the original source-image edges you can closely examine where they meet up to unexpectedly blend, the (+ve projecting) and (-ve containing) ‘bulbs’—where they rhythmically lock together in ‘given’ stamped mechanical rhythms. There is an enticing pulse to these wobbly borders.

Aspects of Langdon-Pole’s intriguing practice remind me of Imants Tillers’ canvas-boards and his appropriation ‘hybridity’ of the eighties, but obviously it is far more visually intricate. The presence of an underpinning grid is more nuanced and discreet. Less dominant. A complex, interlocking holistic field where viewer distance is crucial.

The notes in the catalogue about source material however I wonder about, for they are obviously intended to assist in the viewer’s formation of meaning. It could be argued they intrude, yet these large grunty (highly cerebral) dreamlike combinations are certainly interesting, and physical and spectacular.

John Hurrell

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