João Penalva
Francis Graham-Dixon Gallery
João Penalva’s paintings are willfully beautiful. Yet their charm is not something that obscures reality for the sake of a little rarefied sensation. Sensation there is, but as the viewer shuttles back and forth between different techniques, effects, and ways of picturing, the experience of the work includes both more overtly physical and more purely abstract moments as part of the larger texture of response. Penalva’s preferred format is a binary one: two panels, slightly taller than they are wide, placed one above the other. Whether he is working on a small or large scale, this configuration