Sam Falls
Untitled (Los Angeles, CA, Philodendron 1)
“In the summer, I go into the woods and watch the light filter through the canopy of leaves. I lay coats of fabric in the forest behind our house in order to capture the beams cutting through the leaves from sunrise to sunset. The wind moves the shadows in seconds and the sun over hours, these fields of colour are abstracted dials of a place, deemed temporarily two-dimensional so that one can perceive the third dimension as a sensation of a landscape.”
Donated by Daniela Memmo d’Amelio. Pigment on canvas, 2016, 206 × 147 cm.
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Born in 1984 in San Diego, USA. He currently lives and works between Los Angeles and New York.
American-born Sam Falls’s production combines his various artistic interests in photography, painting, performance and sculpture, while embracing the founding principles of these languages: light, colour, process and quality of matter. The attention to the relationship between man and nature is in fact manifested in his ability to dose action with the temporal cyclicity of the environment, in a balance in which air, climate and the passing of time play a primary role in interaction with the raw material. A passage from the text produced on the occasion of his exhibition at the Galleria Civica di Trento in 2018 brilliantly sums up Falls’s poetics: “In the summer I go into the woods and watch the light filtering through the canopy of leaves. I lay down sheets of fabric in the forest behind our house to capture the projections that pass through the leaves from dawn until dusk. The wind moves the shadows over the course of seconds and the sun over that of hours; these fields of colour are abstract sundials of a place, made temporarily two-dimensional so that you can perceive the third dimension as the sensation of landscape.”