In Anastasya Peña's paintings, materials never surrender their identities. Beginning with poured acrylic, she establishes the painting's initial form. She then creates meticulous passages of oil that echo, extend, and occasionally depart from the original pour, responding to its contours through a distinctly different painterly approach. In many paintings, glossy passages of acrylic medium--and the occasional concentrated bursts of thick undiluted paint--further complicate the relationship between what has been poured and what has been painted. The relationship never fully coheres. A gap remains. Each layer reaches toward the other, not to resolve but to accentuate their difference, seeking connection without eliminating distinctions.
Peña extends the logic of poured abstraction beyond the pour itself. The initial acrylic stain is never treated as a completed event but as something to be negotiated by subsequent material interventions. The paintings become less about the poured form itself than the successive acts through which disparate elements overlap and acquire new meaning through their relationships to one another.
In Peña's paintings, unity is not the opposite of difference but its consequence. Some boundaries remain clearly defined while others become permeable, allowing poured, painted, and glazed passages to influence one another while remaining materially distinct. Transition itself becomes an active pictorial element and not something to be concealed. Rather than resolving these material differences, Peña sustains them, constructing paintings whose coherence emerges through their continued exchange.