Huseyin Sami—Paintings

For Huseyin Sami, paint is an elastic material — the action of painting an experimental, novel landscape. For Paintings, his second solo exhibition at Sophie Gannon Gallery, Sami has continued this same stroke of material investigation. Each piece is a refined study of how paint can prompt ideas of time, fluidity, action, and process. In Paintings, Sami resumes his fascination with the boundaries of paint and its supreme chemical limitations, unravelling ideas that govern its more orthodox application.

The very heart of Sami’s practice is highly procedural. He is unconcerned with the stricter conventions of composition, instead permitting material to navigate the outcome. Severed, dried and draped household acrylic is laid on canvas, or gently stretched over rounded wire frames.

“It’s important for me to continue to push the limits of the material,” he says. In Paintings, Sami has simplified his collage process, revealing more of the surface space of which his cut paint skins are adhered to. “I want to invite new interpretations of material, process and space.”

The palette is made up of Sami’s signature softer hues—a colour theory of muted lemon yellows, salmon pinks, stone grey, lilac, and seafoam green. Torn from a typical hardware store colour wheel, the domestic essence conjures the weathered peel-away of a faded suburban milieu—an illustration of time and impermanence in material. 

Exhibition essay for Paintings by Huseyin Sami at Sophie Gannon Gallery.

Exhibition catalogue can be found here.