Arthur Peña is in the mood for a change. In search of a way to heighten the “sensory experience” of painting, the New York-based artist changed up his technique and out came a whole new body of work. The results will soon be leaving his studio in the Bronx to make their public debut at Independent New York with Harlesden High Street gallery.

“Body” is the operative word here. For the past decade all Peña’s paintings have shared the title Attempt, with a number indicating when it was completed in the series. “The Attempts have always been about the body in some way. The body as a vessel. How much can it hold? How much should it hold?” he explains. 

Peña is recognized for neon-hued works offering sharp visual puns. Take Attempt 197, from 2020, depicting a backlit knife with the word “ETERNAL” across the blade, suggesting that scars might just be forever. Or its predecessor Attempt 193, whose image of teeth chomping on a disembodied arm serves as a reminder not to bite the hand that feeds you.

While Peña’s brush remains faithful to that taut style, a recent visit to his studio revealed the artistic quantum leap he’s made to where his practice stands now. At Independent, Harlesden High Street will present three of his largest paintings to date: deep inquiries into the psychological condition through a maze of comics and pop-culture references fed through the AI image generator Midjourney. The process “comes from the openness of trying new things,” he explains. “That has also changed the work in a lot of ways.”

Peña hasn’t flipped his practice entirely, à la Philip Guston. Neon lines remain an aesthetic anchor: a through-line in his paintings. Harlesden High Street’s founder, Jonny Tanna, says: “I’ve got an obsession with lines. Arthur really takes a lot of care and precision when it comes to lining up and layering up the work.” Peña’s color palette is as electric as ever. 

However, the flash of punny psychology found in his older Attempts has given way to fully-fledged narrative scenes of action and emotion. This is perhaps nowhere clearer than in Attempt 217, an image that feels pulled out of a gory comic book by Bill Alexander, a Peña favorite. The artist speaks of his love of “underground horror magazines and comics and their use of absurd body horror,” as well as 1980s cartoons, like He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. Three Skeletor-type hooded reapers encircle a protagonist who’s soon to be sawn in half, with Peña’s lines guiding the motion and anxiety. Will our hero survive? 

Taken together, the Attempts are also a living lineage of Peña’s evolving work, an archive of his subjectivity unfolding in real time. The uniform title is an equalizing tactic, a recognition that from where one has come is essential to who one is now. A constant accumulation of versions of the self as one progresses through time. “I’m changing all the time, so the work should follow those shifts,” Peña says. “It is always about the shifting nature of being, and that is reflected in this openness to what comes into the work because you try not to shut things out. That’s just how life works, too.” 

Infused into this process is Peña’s wrestling with the physical transformations he’s witnessing in himself and his family. Attempt 211, a suspended sculpture of a disembodied leg covered in mirror fragments and (real, but dead) butterflies propped up on mezcal bottles, grew out of his feelings about his father’s health conditions, which are leading to blindness and the possibility of surgical limb removal. The work’s fragility means it will not be exhibited at Independent. Its materiality has an intensely personal charge, incorporating gifted bottles of mezcal, appropriated objects from his dad’s hobby of collecting, and the broken mirror, an ancient symbol of sight.

 In Attempt 209, for instance, the rattlesnake harbors associations of Texas and the vast lawlessness of the Wild West. The prevalence of violent imagery might echo his youthful exposure to gang bloodshed as well as cartoon villains and comics. Could his vivid colors speak to a father who is losing his vision, or the infusion of glitter pay homage to his mother’s own art practice?

For Tanna at Harlesden High Street, Peña’s ingrained “sense of community and family unity” has a clear connection to the gallery’s mission of supporting underrepresented artists, both locally to its northwest London neighborhood and internationally. “We align with his practice based on his sense of community; the idea is to bring everybody together.” 

Peña is a natural match for the “art for everybody” approach that Tanna has realized through Harlesden High Street. But don’t mistake his artistic imagination, keyed to the accessible language of pop culture, for something simple. In this grouping of work, there is always an element of trickery, of using color and visual cues “to change the meaning, to filter a scene in a specific way that we think is so obvious,” he explains. Smart art is never as it seems.