Sam Lock: Stanza

Sam Lock’s new exhibition - ‘Stanza’ opens in our Milan gallery on Wednesday the 26th of February. This will be the British artist’s third exhibition with us in Milan after ‘The Fragment and the Infinite’ in Lambrate in 2021 and the exhibition that opened our Milan space, ‘Carta’ in 2023.

‘Stanza’, either meaning a group of lines of poetry that form a unit or a related group of lines within a poem. We can see this idea and meaning translated visually into Sam’s new paintings on raw canvas and on paper and board. All the work in the exhibition is related structurally – cut from the same cloth, subject to the same formatting, they are a single work, never seen as such, then divided.  Loss is at their heart.

The exhibition is formed in two parts. Five large paintings form the larger works in the exhibition, these have been cut from a roll of raw canvas, each one a moment, an encapsulation of a state of flow. Sam, working on the ground in pen and ink, creating these moments or ‘stanzas’. The canvas is then cut, stretched and framed in aluminium. The narrative line is broken into 5 moments, all separate but still part of the whole act. The paintings work together and talk across their separate boundaries – they are at once together and apart.

The second part of the exhibition is the installation. The installation is based on the same ideas of together and apart – the fragment and the infinite.  There are relationships here – echoes, similarities and difference. Each of the seventy panels has its own mark, made on found paper, affixed to a panel, covered with resin and then smoothed down.

Each panel has its own voice and tries to converse or be heard both as an individual and also as part of a whole, the possibilities are endless.  Your eyes are pulled from one work to another. Sam calls this ‘a map of looking’. The room is immersive, one is surround by the marks and moments that hang in space. At first glance these marks on these panels look like they could be read narratively, like prose or sheet music, each one has it’s own history, the paper has its own small marks. But at scale, as a whole, they become bigger than the sum of their parts, the installation expands and contracts, the fragment and the infinite.

Please get in touch at info@cadogangallery.com for further information or to view the preview.