I create paintings of sun-drenched domestic spaces that celebrate the quiet moments of everyday life. My paintings are an opportunity for me to play with and piece together things I love into a painting: books of favorite artists, coffee cups and candlesticks, walls filled with family portraits, and art by friends. I wear my influences on my sleeve, sometimes using a Vuillard inspired pattern and including his book open on the table or showing a favorite Lois Dodd piece on the wall of my kitchen. I use light and pattern as tools for abstraction.

Plaster is to a house as fabric is to a quilt; both are materials transformed to aid our need for warmth and shelter. In my work, paintings are images sprung from recollection and fantasy, while objects encompass real and psychological rooms. Each manifestation reflects a distinct place and period of time, while all of the work assembled evolves over time. My work allows a viewer to use commonly understood symbols and mementos in order to freely associate with their own identities and stories. I want my work to challenge how we name a thing through the re-contextualization of materials.

My work dwells in a liminal space—a barren "Umwelt,” that should elicit a feeling of discomfort, dread, or foreboding.

I make 2D paintings of 3-dimensional shadows of 4th dimensional events.

My paintings are collages of inherited memories, framed like a photograph, by symbols of post-colonial history. I grew up in Guayanilla, Puerto Rico, a land marked by the colonial labors of sugarcane production. Through painting, I explore my culture, connection to family, nostalgia, love, and grief. The places I depict are collages of memories and imagination. My paintings are a connection to my family’s oral history.

My background in scenic painting has drawn me to the stage and its many layers of reality. The curtain represents a boundary between the box below: the spectator and active space. However, without actors, this boundary creates a minimal and transitional zone with the potential to explore multiple narratives. I am drawn to passages, doorways, and paintings within paintings. These motifs become places I am yearning to go but can never enter into. I have the feeling if I walk into this space, there will be another one behind it, creating a never-ending cycle.

My work is an act of synthesizing memory, family history, and place. The collaged nature of my paintings speaks to this synthesis and serves to mimic the convoluted nature of memory and blurriness of familial narratives. Many objects incorporated throughout my paintings are seemingly arbitrary but hold weight in my memory for their feeling of permanence.

Peñafiel’s works unravel the grim tapestry of our world, a chaotic realm entrenched in the cyclical grip of history and politics. His immersive installations serve as a raw mirror reflecting the relentless struggles faced by the marginalized and downtrodden, revealing the insidious workings of prevailing power structures.

My oil paintings encompass a wide range of subject matters and styles. However, if there is one thread that pulls my work together it is the idea of responding to, and expressing emotions and experiences, through painting. I am influenced by what I see in my everyday life. Mundane events, media, human desire, motivation, apathy, and helplessness are just some of the interconnected reasons to paint. The banality of the images depicted—sometimes in bright, saturated colors and other times faded and pale—become surrogate self-portraits, memories, and hopeful futures.

I’m interested in painting and color as a way to explore interior spaces and intimate moments that are often overlooked—paying attention to what is happening when “nothing” is happening—specifically through the nuance and beauty of shadows during ordinary scenes. Shadows have reminded me that these spaces are not static; they're constantly shifting, blending, shrinking, and elongating our surroundings and ourselves, causing our shapes to mingle and hues to change even if we don't intend for them to.