Announcing Paul Shakespear: Corrientes at Howard Yezerski Gallery

Paul Shakespear: Corrientes opens tonight! Check out the press release below.

Press Release:

Howard Yezerski Gallery is pleased to present new work by Paul Shakespear. The paintings are a powerful compression of emotion, memory, and visual delight. The title of the show, Corrientes, references the slow change of shifting trends, a half-lit address in Buenos Aires out of a song, the watery depth of ocean currents. 

Paul Shakespear, Cove, 2011, acrylic on canvas, 26" x 60 1/4", Photo: Will Howcroft

 The paintings are slow - they demand contemplation. Upwards of thirty glazes of acrylic are brushed, troweled, and rubbed on. The hours that Shakespear puts into the work are compressed into those layers and layers of thin glazes, their distinct features emerging slowly as you let them. 

Paul Shakespear, Seville, 2011, acrylic on canvas, 12" x 65", Photo: Will Howcroft

 Shakespear is hesitant to reference influences from life - the paintings are evocations of something deeper than changes on the surface. Not unlike deep sea currents, unseeable and untouchable, but essential to the planet as inner thoughts are to our being. Also like the sea, the surfaces are alluring, a glossy window onto the world within. The gloss is a byproduct of the process, of the subtlety of the layers built up. With each layer the colors are richer and richer - building a visual conversation underneath the sheen. Be careful of this gloss - look too fast and you'll miss the space within it. 

Paul Shakespear, Pitfall, 2011, acrylic on canvas, 66" x 36", Photo: Will Howcroft

The paintings are objects that don't sit exactly on the wall - they swell with light and float off in one direction or another. Multiple panels build off of one another - tension fills the space between them. Colors within hum with tension and resonance. The result is otherworldly in the sense that they are solid but made up of the intangible, the ghostly, the not quite knowable; Shakespear looks to capture the stuff of that ethereal realm that lives beside us and within us.

On view April 20 - May 22, 2012