PYRISCENCE

SenaSpace Gallery is pleased to present Pyriscence, an exhibition featuring a selection of dynamic sculptures and large-scale drawings on paper by gallery founder, David Sena. Conceived as a retrospective, Pyriscence revisits techniques developed and refined by Sena over the past twenty years.  Together they comprise a rich vocabulary of fire-based marks.

The exhibition is a series of silhouette self-portraits, each created through shadow projection, one of the many ways Sena attempts to avert authorship and to examine himself with the detachment of a scientist -- as a pure consequence of shadow and light.  Making himself the subject, as mysterious and multi-layered as the night-sky, Sena personalizes his exploration of universal questions of existence.  His search is an intricate and technical choreography of burning and extinguishing, control and release.  The resultant surface resembles a shooting target but reverses its violence.  The voids are revelatory: they allow glimpses of infinity; they are outlets for the mind’s energy; the distances between layers create volume and mimic the dance of gravitational motion.  The self becomes a mirror, the cosmos reflected in an interior expanse.  

The exhibition title refers to an adaptation of certain seeds to fire-prone ecosystems.  These seeds regenerate only after exposure to extreme heat.  Sena’s self-portraits reflect on his own emergence as an artist in New York City, his own becoming by fire.