Kenneth and I met because of a map he painted. The famously inaccurate oval world map, a distorting grid of the globe, was overlaid on his painting with the vowel chart, which is a distorting grid of our mouth. The vowel chart represents the positions of our tongue as we pronounce different vowels, mapping them in two dimensions. It captures the vowels of every spoken human language in its seven lines, cleverly, by synthesising the shared physical traits of our speech organ rather than any particular dialect. It takes a leap of imagination to connect the geometric grid to the feeling of your tongue resting behind your teeth. In this way, the two contradictory forces of this exhibition were present in Kenneth’s work from the start: a maximalist desire to capture as much of experience as possible – the world, all of language, life – and the reductionist language of paring back, illegibility, abstraction.

The riddle of these two contradicting forces (of saying everything and saying as little as possible) is perhaps at the implacable core of human thinking, nagging us forever. Diagrams contain it as a visual format – the maximalism of scope and minimalism of means – in that they rely on distortion, oversimplification and poetic jumps in their strive to provide an understanding more immediate than a description could. Through this, diagrams often become puzzles, self-encrypted. But in the new works presented here, painted on wood tiles and linen canvases in repeating proportions, Kenneth arrives at another method people have thought of to cope with the unsolvable: the mathematical riddle of tessellation, or tiling.

Surprisingly, tiling is one of the fundamental mathematical problems that seems as humbling to the greatest minds of the 1600s as it is now, with new solutions found recently by retired hobbyists as well as university teams. It concerns finding the most economical ways of reproducing a geometric shape infinitely, or filling space, most readily recognised in mosaic tilework patterns. Some shapes lend themselves to streamlined reproduction and tessellate easily, like polygons, and some are unwieldy and inefficient, like ovals. (Kenneth uses both.) This economy in maximising the reproducibility of a solution and minimising excess information can be quite poetically referred to in mathematics as elegance. Elegance is then an aesthetic judgement applied to our pattern recognition.

And there are patterns to be recognised among the paintings: maximalist, inefficient, elegant and poetic, all. The wooden tiles’ rectangular and oval proportions replicate in reference to one another, similar to a DIN paper format, forming a relationship as a group of objects. Before even approaching their content, the paintings start meddling with the outside: the proportions don’t relate to something in the image plane or inside our mind, but to the electrical fuse box, to the window, to the air conditioning unit.

Once in the picture plane, the paintings cast us back and forth between orders of magnitude: the position of our bodies in our immediate surroundings and in reference to some larger system. In one work, an architectural plan of a Paris apartment calls to our own location in the gallery, standing inside a block just like it, like many other apartments; feeling our feet on the wooden floor like the vowel chart made us feel our tongue. In Untitled (2026), a view from a window somewhere else in the world corresponds to one next to us, right in our many-dimensioned present. The pillar in the middle of the gallery is reproduced in white paper collage and white paint on canvas, Column (2026), not an image but texture and space – a tile, something between object and painting. This ambiguity continues in paintings that reveal their wood-grain physicality and in their image planes, where a white overcast obscures definitions: any universalising anatomical shape is unfinished, overpainted, shy of legibility.

Unreliable narrators of universal patterns, these new paintings grapple with uncertainty and a murky sense of order. The language of representation, or references to rationalism or a stability of scientific iconography that Kenneth’s past work had, is dissolved into a looser, more hypothetical space, and the paintings’ status as objects or images is unsettled. Muted in their surface-level expression, they draw the entire room into a complex play of refraction, confusing and implicating, and perhaps offering a challenge to clarity. Language suffers both from saying everything and from saying as little as possible; a solution to the riddle may not always exist.

-Tosia Leniarska