JAMES SIENA

"Siena’s latest exhibition, at Miles McEnery’s 515 West 22nd Street outpost, is composed almost entirely of intuitive drawings made in 2022–23, continuing his shift, in the last five years, toward larger surfaces and a diverse set of morphologies. 'Drawing,' he says, 'is a loaded word.' He subscribes to the curatorial definition: a drawing is any work made on paper. Alongside graphite, colored pencil, and Conté crayon, Siena’s drawings at Miles McEnery deploy an arsenal of liquids—india ink, gouache, watercolor, acrylic—that thicken and dilute within small banks of color, reinforcing the presence of his hand amid a labyrinth of lines."

- Laura Bannister in “Drawing is a Loaded Word: Conversations with James Siena”

"Metasternum (2022), a frenetic, twitching snake print of a drawing, proffers multiple entry points. Inky, indented trapezoids beckon the viewer like smartphone screens—blank, calming voids to dive inside of. They bunch and un-bunch in vertical rows, swelling in size at the paper’s top and bottom perimeters, growing closer and more compacted at the horizontal center—where the work’s generative line is. Punctuated with angular banks of fluctuating copper—which have been rendered in colored pencil—the stacked, blackened units evoke ladder rungs, staircases, and escalators. At once solid and empty, flat and three dimensional, they allow the viewer’s eye to plunge inward and navigate across."

- Laura Bannister in “Drawing is a Loaded Word: Conversations with James Siena”