ABOUT THE WORK

Sam Penaso’s language comes across through vivid mashups of color and geometry, building up shapes of color and then cutting away. His visual vocabulary has acquired a new depth which has resulted in a work that celebrates the free spirit of art and the joy of life. Penaso’s work with metal influenced the non-objective forms he used in both his paintings and sculptures and infused him with a new freedom of painterly expression. His painting stressed shape and planar masses (often assuming non-rectilinear formats). The artist’s development had been resolutely inner-directed: neither a reaction nor the outcome of a dialogue with his contemporaries. Penaso takes the entire canvas as the starting point, treating it as a continuous, flat surface that could be activated by interlocking geometries of color. In this work there is no reference to the figurative. The idea of painting as object rather than representation is fully made manifest.