Sam Songailo

Categories Installation, PaintingPosted on

Immersive and relentless, the paintings, videos and installations of Sam Songailo arrest our attention through both their sheer intensity and their tremendous associative powers. While clearly linked to a number of key antecedents (the work of Bridget Riley and the wall paintings of Sol LeWitt for example), Songailo’s work employs a distinctly personal aesthetic that owes as much to various imagined futures of film and literature as it does to the past. A number of commentators (including Songailo himself) have highlighted the futuristic character of the artist’s work, but to what future does it belong? Not the ray-gun Gothic of 1950s science-fiction, nor a post- apocalyptic dystopia. Songailo’s vision more closely resembles what we thought the future might be like in the eighties: the neon noir of Blade Runner, the cyberspace of Tron, even the 2015 posited by Back to the Future II (at the time of writing, amusingly imminent).

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