The Cat Came Back
Peter Shear
CASTLE presents ‘The Cat Came Back,’ an exhibition of new paintings by Peter Shear.
Peter Shear’s paintings are ghost towns along a highway, ambient zones ripe for meditation. Boundaries endure, though always loose. The works are either self-contained within the frame or else they open outward, beyond the canvas; touch and then go. He produces apertures into his own world and the one at large. Shear is receptive to varied histories and his surroundings, allowing for generative energies to move his paintbrush from one corner to another and from one canvas to the next. He succumbs to the “hopeless gesture” in action and production; The emergent painting is complicated by the brushwork that produced it.
Shear’s compositions are resolutely inchoate, reflecting an always-becomingness. He has expressed that his paintings are consistently produced without agenda, thus allowing for ubiquity. Moments of recognition coincide with moments of action while he paints. His nimble process yields equivocalities, proposals without certitutes. He drives each composition to an intersection then abandons it, lending the viewer an opportunity for a chance encounter. Shear hangs ideas on the viewer’s poetics. In this respect, a painting's potential successes and failures rest squarely upon those who ponder it.
Drum is an arid landscape, the view from within a plume of smoke, the last of a snail slinking away. Draft is a flock of seagulls, the climax of sea spray, connect-the-dots culminating in the head of a rat. Quarry is a tree interrupting the dark expanse of night, a bird’s-eye view of a fractured highway with a quick succession of dead end roads, the Chicago skyline. Rorschach tests. The exhibition’s title contributes to this ambivalence. “The Cat Came Back” is pulled from Harry S. Miller’s 19th century folk song, though on a linguistic level, lends to a pliancy of space, a “here” that one may abandon and then return to.
The works on view are recording devices and containers for thoughts. Some paintings are punctuation marks, others run-on sentences. The viewer can then come and finish sentences or else engage in a Mad Lib, filling in blanks here and there. Shear therefore denies an objective and instead offers ruminations on colorfield. National Garden presents an encounter between hot pink and maroon, while Honey pushes cerulean to its logical conclusion. The latter painting brings to mind a poem by James Tate where he details the fluttering of a butterfly with “a celestial blueness to soothe the weary heart.” With Tate as a reference point, Shear explores open endedness and bedrocks for interpretation. He’s not committed to high stakes, but rather a methodical and enduring approach to his practice. It’s easier for the painter to do than to get stuck in meditation.
Shear kicks a can down automotism’s road, allowing for paintings to “push back” here and there. The ideas stored in these compositions are not reverse engineered, but rather emergent. Propelled by exploration and curiosity, Shear inhales content and exhales expression, following paintings around corners and indexing styles along the way. A marked consideration of precedents persists within his practice. By situating Mary Heilmann, Jasper Johns, and Cézanne on the same horizon, temporal and conceptual fractures occur. The canvas becomes a receptacle for the work done prior to the application of paint-on-surface; mind as an organizing tool.
- Reilly Davidson
Peter Shear (b. 1980, Beverly Farms, Massachussets; lives and works in Bloomington, Indiana). Recent solo exhibitions include Fortnight Institute, New York; KOKI ARTS, Tokyo. “The Cat Came Back” is Shear’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles and his first exhibition with CASTLE.
