Every idea is a migrant – the phrase opened Standard Deviation by Patrick Waterhouse at A4 in 2025. This publication explores the uncanny outcomes of Waterhouse’s The Unknown Masterpiece, an experiment in copying, sequencing, and playing iterative games. The artist invites a painter – one skilled in the art of reproduction –
to replicate an exact likeness of a work. With this ‘copy’ in hand he engages a new artist, delivers the same set of instructions, repeats this process in a form of painterly ‘broken telephone’. “How do you put thoughts into images in a way that helps people know that thoughts are ideologies? This can be done through putting unlike things together that shows their likeness, it can be done through subversion, or intervention. You need categorisation, but it’s also the start of all the problems, the differences... We need category to understand the world,
but category can lead to tyranny” (PW, 2025). The Unknown Masterpiece maps an unscripted shift from realism to abstraction.