absTRAIT

Sam Lock

His works are an exploration into the rhythms and currents of painting, a journey between and through layers, a build-up of moments in time and intuitions followed. The alchemy of the painting process transforms this time-spent into a physical and tangible history. They are an invitation to become lost and tangled in their surface, to find something new each time you look and hold the gaze, to make a connection with the senses, paintings you feel. They whisper suggestions. Each work is a mystery and a contradiction that is at once solid and substantial yet elusive.

Change is a process not an event, there is a continual flow and movement around us and in us, a constant conversion of what is happening now into the past. Lock's works are made in that space, their appearance is created by it and the way they communicate relies upon it. They are not made with a system or fixed process but through an energy that is built on Change and Chance, organic and unscripted. Each painting or sculpture or space follows its own path until there is a balance between presence and absence; where there are silences and hiding places that are both poetic and activating.

Antonio Bokel

Antonio Bokel reveals a constant crossing between art and the fabric of urban life, as constituent parts of his symbolic universe. He uses this experience of the city like existential sequences – there he builds his referential space, there he seems to invent a territory, there he intends to constitute an aesthetic and spatial extension in a broader dimension.

In this area of ​​intersection there is a capacity for poetic improvisation from the assimilation of the most varied materials and supports, such as enigmatic objects, urban utensils, the insertion of letters, word games or literary fragments, which pass through the murals, on the surfaces of canvases, photographs, sculptures or spatial installations.
But it is in his painting that we find the chords of his field of action, indicative of an integrating force of his aesthetic concerns, balancing colors, shapes and volumes in a mosaic of rhythmic brushstrokes that bring out the asymmetries of the world.

In this troubled territory, the artist evokes a reflection on contemporary urban space. His artistic production is not an isolated phenomenon in the studio, but it inscribes itself in the world, in a public sphere, by embodying its emergence on the city walls – both simultaneously welcome his pictorial practice and create a fusion between the work and the world.