Paul Senyol’s paintings are a study of humanity through his experiences of place. The artist spends his time painting and commuting by bicycle and skateboard through the landscape of his city. His daily encounters with the life of the street remains a turnkey source of artistic inspiration for him. Peculiar to his city, Cape Town, is the Table Mountain range that disrupts the urban sprawl while being part of that same urban landscape. As such, a wonderer can traverse concrete, sandstone, river and drainpipes in an easy mile, as the crow flies. There is an archaeology at work in Senyol’s painting process, an artistic excavation of place. The works are autobiographical in inception, but these autobiographical events are obscured by Senyol’s painting process such that the task of archaeology returns to us in how we receive these visual maps.
Landscapes and objects populate the fields of Senyol’s compositions. Each work is a painted analysis of place. In some parts that analysis seems reductive as conventional perspective and trompe l’oeil are cast aside in favour of manifesting a procreative stage for the impulsive mark or the additive scrawl. Characterised by curious planes of colour, gestural marks inspired by graffiti and more intimate, child-like crayon scribblings, Senyol’s paintings are rich textural surfaces that allude to an imaginative excavation in search of the anthropogenic.
