Gold, surface, light.

Irene Zenoni (b. 1991, Vicenza) is an Italian abstract artist working at the intersection of material heritage and the language of abstraction. Born in a city long tied to the working of precious metals, she inherited gold as a material fluency passed down through generations of goldsmiths.

Her paintings are studies in luminescence and materiality. Gold functions not as ornament but as an active element, shifting with the movement of light across the surface and entering into dialogue with shadow, depth and colour. Her canvases are built layer by layer, and their surfaces glint and change as light moves across them.

"I work with gold as leaf and paint, and it does not behave. It refuses to sit still under light. It changes the moment you move. It is leaf and medium, an image of the thing rather than the thing itself. To work with it, I first had to understand everything it had already been made to mean."

Irene Zenoni

Trained between Central Saint Martins and Istituto Marangoni, she turned to painting to explore the relationship between gold, light and perception.