Penney’s recent works seek to reconcile an interest in the formal qualities of colour and gesture, with a long-standing interest in the suggestive quality of illusionistic space and an economic means of delineating it.

His paintings suggest the recognisable, yet leave the viewer trying to make sense, and ultimately uncertain. Occupying an in-between. Similar to the transitory or ‘non places’ that many of the works allude to. This unspecific quality is created by a play between figurative representation and gestural mark making. Leaving the viewer seeking to understand the marks that no matter how recognisable, remain no more than an illusion within a painted composition.

Penney’s engagement with abstraction has grown out of an exploration in painting that has developed to express a sense of experience, leading from an underlying desire for understanding. Employing architectural associations, specifically interiors and transitory spaces in an attempt to make reference to something more cognitive than tangible. His employment of only a single colour in many of his most resent compositions gives an intensity juxtaposed by subtle marks that are almost carved back into the painted surface, as if probing the picture plain and questioning the action. The marks carve out a space one sees the potential to occupy, but which is denied by the substantial panel on which the paintings are made. The solid quality of these supports lends a sense of gravity to these paintings that, though very present in their large areas of intense colour show their fallibility in the marks which puncture the surface to the gesso beneath.

Juxtaposition and the ambiguity of the in-between are central to Penney’s painting, the sense of suggestion attempts more to show, than to tell, and inspire questions rather than answer them.