Spray paint, pencil, ink, watercolor on paper. Unframed.
Peter Soriano works on relatively large sheets of Japanese paper with a tendency to work from something observed, ideally around him. He tends to be “in” the configuration that is the subject of the work.
Peter Soriano is a Philippines-born French-American abstract artist who divides his time between New York City and Penobscot, Maine.
Although he began his career as a sculptor, his work is now two-dimensional. He is known for his bold spray-painted wall murals and for his more intimate works on paper.
Soriano’s work is gestural and geometric, dominated by a graphic lexicon of marks and notations.
Soriano's work is owned by museums in the United States and in Europe, including The Fondation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain, Paris, France; the Morgan Library & Museum in New York City; The Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville Maine; Harvard Art Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His work is also included in the corporate collection of Neuberger & Berman in New York.
Soriano is fond of “systems” objects attached to other objects, such as the wiring plan of a room. But very often there are other shapes that play a role in the work.
The artist would fold and rework a piece a number of times. Folding seems to concentrate the dialogue that attracts him. Reworking is part of his nature. The finished work normally is the result of this ebb and flow between the heightening and repositioning the relationship between forms.
This drawing focuses of objects and elements within it, the long thin lines refering to electrical wires.
Soriano’s work is inspired by his surrounding landscapes, including, for example: the Bagaduce, a tidal river that fronts his Maine studio; a hotel room in Busan, South Korea; the configuration of water pipes in his New York loft. Surprisingly, given that he is an abstract artist, he draws inspiration from Swiss 19th-Century landscapes, prehistoric cave paintings, and Japanese studies for Ukiyo-e works on paper.
