PAUL SENYOL: Inhabitant - Solo Exhibition, Salon Ninety One Gallery, 23.09.16

The sun bakes the concrete curb until it warps in a heat haze. In the shady cracks of the tar a persistent green leaf escapes the confines of the ground for light and life. The shimmer of a cracked windscreen creates light effects upon an unevenly painted backyard wall. Inexplicable rubble gathers on a street corner. The traces of its origins long lost: earthworks of a maze of activity defined by the movements of inhabitants.
To inhabit a space implies a type of ownership by presence. City bylaws and property deeds describe space in one way but that map frays at its intersection with the human occupation of place. Daily movements define and embrace space, carving it with the simultaneous care and ruthlessness of a sculptor.
Raymond Lucas in his chapter “Taking a Line for a Walk: Walking as an Aesthetic Practice” (2008) charts the historical citing of Benjamin’s flaneur as the start of a new set of artistic practices focusing on walking as a means of engaging space. He links this to a shift in the way we receive narrative today. The modernist trend is to present information in an ordered, chronological way – where meaning is imparted, not found (p170). The shift to an artistic and narrative practice around providing immersive situations where viewers discover meaning for themselves has emerged as a counterpoint to that reportage trend.
In Senyol’s work, this idea of immersive, experiential space provides a process of critical interrogation with the notion of inhabitation that is neither city bylaw nor street dweller, but somewhere between the two – a place where art is the patina of a lived experience.
The patina of Senyol’s experience of space is one characterised by transition. His home and studio in Woodstock is on the fringe of an urban renewal zone, a site characterized by places of collapse and repair. It is a space of binaries, of wealth and poverty, newness and decay, concrete and park verge. Senyol recognises that between these binaries resides a new creation altogether. This ‘fringe’ between states is his artistic Eden.
The idea of an inscriptive practice inspired by a passion for roaming seems appropriate here. Since the inception of the modern city and its architectural theory, there has been a criticism of its consideration of space in isolation from inhabitants. Contemporary urban theory does much to remedy this with works such as Iain Borden’s (2001) Skateboarding, Space and the City: Architecture and the Body in which the subcultural practice of skateboarding is heralded as a new lens through which to view the use and perception of urban landscapes. Senyol has since the start of his artistic practice, taken his interests in skateboarding, surfing and zines as the starting point for his investigation of space and place. His interest in reinvestigating public understandings of beauty and decay in the urban landscape has foregrounded the ‘fringe’ – a zone on the edge of something or between sites – as a creative site for a new conception of space. The strict management of space in urban environments because of larger systemic concerns of sanitation, access to services, over crowding and economic progress, has resulted in space being categorized too readily (in the nineteenth century ideological concern of ‘urban disease’) in order to facilitate improvement and order. Senyol quietly queries these well-meaning systemic notions and challenges the viewer to consider that a healthy city may have more to do with what conservative urban thinkers perceive of as decay and disease. For instance, Californian artist Barry McGee says that one can tell how healthy a city is by the number of tags on its streets.
For Senyol, its not how far one travels in the city but how fast one travels. At differing paces the texture, shape and form of the urban environment is revealed in new ways. A newly tarred road is a skateboarding heaven to a new speed of spatial experience, the textured remnants of a building excavation the inspiration for a linen canvas.
His works for inhabitant are more loosely based on his daily sketches than in previous exhibitions. He has foregrounded his role as translator in this series, working across multiple canvases simultaneously in a process of experiential storytelling. He has also expanded beyond the canvas into the gallery space itself, evolving that experiential story telling onto textured gallery walls and the inclusion of small sculptures or urban cairns – a personal memorialising of the oft overlooked beauty of urban debris.
In translating the street into the gallery space, Senyol approaches the gallery as a composition. The abstraction of daily life (car tyres on a curb) finds form in the graphic line of paint on stiffly primed linen and canvas. In their materiality his works remind us that these paintings remain as always ‘things in space’ but that they too, like us, by inhabiting the place they exist come to express something new.
References:
Borden, Iain. 2001. Skateboarding, Space and the City: Architecture and the Body. Berg: Oxford.
Lucas, Raymond. 2008. “Taking a Line for a Walk: Walking as an Aesthetic Practice” in Ingold and Vergunst (eds). 2008. Ways of Walking: Ethnography and Practice on Foot. Ashgate: England. p169 - 184