No Shadow Kick – About the Artists

Renzo Centeno is an energetic artist who carries the spirit of a superhero in every piece of work he creates. His love and respect of heroic tales is always apparent in his drawings, paintings, photographs, and graphic designs on Photoshop. Centeno’s work is achieved with a few specialized “superhero” environmental adaptations and his own personal grip tool given his range of motion and positioning in his wheelchair. As he is most comfortable in a reclined position, the tools and surfaces Centeno works with need to adapt to the angle he can best grip, control, and see; this is on his left side raised at approximately 45 degrees so that he  make contact with the surface and control his medium. Centeno’s marks are quick, powerful, and short bursts; the patience and intention with which he applies hundreds of strokes is pure craftsmanship.

Seong Chon is a dynamic artist, working primarily as a painter, graphic media designer, and a photographer. Much of Chon’s painting and design work focuses on his perspective of his Korean heritage. Chon often starts with an image of a Korean landscape, architecture, or cultural totem; he calls these images his “launching pad.” In the early stages of his design concept, he challenges himself to reach a point where he has been faithful and authentic in representing his culture. Once he has passed this threshold, Chon gives himself creative license to add elements and adornments from his imagination to finish the piece.​

As a photographer, Chon is fascinated by the human figure. His vision and technique have been influenced by Robert Mapplethorpe and the great portraiture of modern photography. Chon seeks to capture the personality of his subject, presenting not only their physical persona, but their spirit. He aspires to document who someone is at a place and time, stating, “Their portrait will live on, and it tells a story—their story.”​

Chon utilizes the strength and dexterity of his entire body to control adaptive devices worn on his left foot. With his foot, Chon can operate switches to operate and adjust his camera, design images on photoshop, or sketch and then paint an oversized canvas panel. His work is a representation of culture with dynamic composition, color, lines, and shapes that begin in his head and travel through his body until they are “whipped out” by his foot.

Paul Hassan is a gifted artist who draws, paints, and works in digital media. Hassan’s work is characteristically layered with colors, images, and shapes that create a compelling depth. Placement and juxtaposition are maneuvered to create unique effects influencing the emotion and concept of the piece. His digital images have a quality of stacked and static layers of substance, while his paintings and drawings contain fluid layers of graphite, paint, and markers that seem to be in a state of continuous motion. Hassan works with an adaptive art tool designed to fit on his shoe and creates each work with the use of his dominant foot. Hassan works his entire body to intently control the distinct movements of his foot as he works and does so with fortitude and grace until the piece reaches completion.

The first thing you notice in Britney Joiner’s extraordinary abstractions is their strong sense of structure. Though spontaneous and gesturally automatic in their complex web of linework, upon close examination, Britney’s compositions are remarkably built up as if in a grid-like matrix. In one of her masterpieces, gestural marks in vivid maroon and green rendered in colored marker vertically cascade down the picture plane as scuffs and scumbles of dusty pinks and violets wisp their way across horizontally, enhancing the vague, but definite, sense of an intersecting framework. Clusters of deep blue and red gather into narrow oblong blobs that seem to nest comfortably within plateaus in this framework, creating further zones of visual interest. Deeply personal and one of kind, Britney’s work is noteworthy for being a window onto her complex process of image making in addition to their emotional resonance. 

With a unique delicateness of line and an appreciation of the subtleties of tone and color, Denise Surace creates playful, poetic investigations into the elusiveness of nonfigurative composition. The luminosity of color and the phenomenological complexities of juxtaposed tonalities are the driving force behind Denise’s dazzling abstract worlds. Up and down, sky and earth, suggestion and description are one and the same in her visually dynamic body of work. Flashes of intense colors rendered with a clear, sure line zap in from one side of the picture plane, getting lost in a tangle of other lines which have fluttered in like moths to light from another side as other colors intermingle together in an energetic dance, leaving the viewer enchanted. To investigate one of Denise’s drawings is to witness another world entirely, filled with optical delights and surprises which linger after we’ve looked away.

Cameron Trapani makes exuberant abstract drawings full of color and energy. Visually busy, compositionally lively, Cameron’s approach is impulsive and playful. Beginning on one side of the picture plane, Cameron initiates an art piece by making unpremeditated gestural marks in a chosen color with marker. He works his way across the entirety of the surface until it is all filled with seemingly impulsive graphic marks. Spaces between the marks reveal the whiteness of the drawing paper underneath, giving certain areas an open, airy feeling, while areas where more dense gestures have landed coalesce into more solid regions of vibrancy. The overall effect is dazzling, giving the viewer the feeling, they are looking into a beautiful, overgrown garden, or a thick jungle overflowing with life: visual metaphors for Cameron’s abundant imagination.  

Linda Sparkman is an imaginative abstract artist who prefers torrents of rich, saturated color to contour line drawing, giving her captivating compositions a surprisingly painterly field of color effect. Zones of dramatic pigmentation stand still, majestically, in the deep, indeterminate space of the picture plane like a stormfront as cascades of fresh color flood in, clashing, but in perfect visual harmony, creating a signified whole. This gives the viewer suggestions of opposing aspects of the natural world working together. Though small in scale, Linda’s work gives us the feeling of being on a large scale, conceptually, like when we look deep into the sky at the slow, but ever changing dynamism and fluidity of meteorology at work. Linda’s work is the best kind of gift. It’s artwork which encourages us to daydream and be creative in the space of our own imagination as we contemplate her signature vision.