Salvatore Panasci’s abstract paintings offer invigorating, sensorial encounters with color and texture. With their multiple layers and vertical brushstrokes, the paintings evoke latitude and motion. Thick clusters and rough terrains of paint contrast thinner washes, giving Panasci’s work a compelling dimensionality. Panasci allows watery streams of color to flow down the canvas, creating a chorus of drips that resembles a lyrically saturated waterfall. Often, these falling drips lightly veil the energetic, bold shapes that move in and out of each other in the layers below.
Through his paintings, Panasci endeavors to create an ineffable, gripping experience of sensations. He wants viewers to engage the paintings in dialogue, questioning the relationships between color and surface, darkness and lightness, or materially and immateriality. These are questions that ideally bring people closer to understanding the physical and emotional world they inhabit. Panasci received a BFA from Philadelphia College of the Arts in 1971. He has exhibited nationally and currently lives and works in Devon, Pennsylvania.