"There are so many different forms this piece of work could have become, endless other destinations or endings. The marks we make are only part of the story, the unmade marks and all the other potential marks that could have been made are present in their absence."
"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."
Freddie Burness
Director Cadogan Gallery