My work addresses and explores my personal experiences as an African American male living with Sickle Cell Anemia. Within my work I use the figurative forms of the sickle and normal cell in environments that depict the internal states of being that I’ve experienced throughout my lifetime. I explore abstract realms such as uncertainty, desire, longing, faith, perseverance, structure/lack of structure, fragility, and conflict through the process of painting.

My work is about attention span, babies, canaries, description, extracts, filters, grouping, hums, importance, jelly, kerning, looming, motion sensors, nerves, order, parity, qwerty, respite, smallness, stillness, tact, understanding, vanity, the West, xenophobias, yeses, and zeros.

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.