NYAB Event - David Sena "Inevitable Futures"

David Sena "Inevitable Futures"

Yashar Gallery

This event has ended.

Encountering David Sena‟s works is much like discovering a mystical document, a map pointing to the reason for human existence, or rather the outer limits, the infinite, the space not yet grasped. In the midst of voids, of what once was, and what has been removed by flame, is the substance of being. The work in Sena‟s “Inevitable Futures” is mostly figurative, strictly speaking, but what these „drawings‟ capture is at once fleeting, difficult to grasp in the very least, and infinite—death, galaxies, and the Higgs‟ boson, i.e., „the God particle.‟ Yet, taking in Sena‟s work here is reminiscent of laying back upon the solid earth, damp and fragrantly fecund and looking into the fabric of the night sky and seeing layer upon layer of stars and grasping with that perspective what it is to be a tiny blip of humanity in the infinitely tiny moment of now. What is existential and massive becomes intimate and tangible in Sena‟s work, the mark of fire transforms paper and the viewer into an infinite being, proof that art can transfigure, and enlighten.
Time and space are recurring tropes in Sena‟s work—two concepts that are often used to ascertain if something is real. Does it exist? Do we exist? In what reality do we exist?
One feels as though the fabric of time is shifting as one examines Sena‟s work, a vertigo is evoked, an existential crisis is inspired and we are transformed by looking into the abyss of the infinite. There is comfort in the nothingness, as we come to know voids intimately. Death is always looming but so is the possibility of something beyond it. There are the spaces between us that we navigate physically and theoretically and importantly, the potential of connection and understanding held within those vessels of nil, nothingness. To know our outer limits, to map where we end and infinity begins is a promise of safety, a connection to divinity, which is surely all that is unknown but glimmering at us faintly, just beyond our technology, our mental and spiritual faculties‟ grasp. The questions that drive us have never been rendered so beautifully as in Sena‟s work. To think the charred edge of a circular hole in paper could bring us closer to the divine—truly, there is magic in this art.