EVOKE Contemporary | Through 7/3 | Santa Fe, NM

Stillness in Shadow

Andrew Shears examines the light and shadow of everyday objects at a new show at EVOKE Contemporary

For painter Andrew Shears, there is a beautiful simplicity in the mundane, the ordinary, the pedestrian. He remembers going to parties, during those ancient pre-pandemic times, and being fascinated by windows sills, walls with interesting textures or shapes, or banged-up floors. “People probably thought I was weird, but it was those simple things in the world that were my subjects,” he says. “It wasn’t even about exposing the beauty, but just about using these objects as a launchpad to talk about more formal issues involving painting.”WWI Helmet, oil on board, 12 x 9"

The issues he wanted to talk about were light and shadow, abstraction, form and even expressionism to a certain degree. The paintings have culminated into a new grouping of images that are now open at EVOKE Contemporary in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The show, titled Still, focuses on these everyday subjects that fascinate him, but also explore ways he can push his paint around in interesting new ways. Taboret, oil on canvas, 50 x 40"

“I love to get lost in the paint, which is where my interest in expressionism comes in. I think of the paintings as a series of flat rectangles. And even as I paint tables and windows, the paintings embody rectangles from the very start. I want them to function as almost geometric abstraction, an illusion of physicality within the paint. I also like dividing the two worlds: representational and abstraction. I see them as separate worlds.”Garage Reflection, oil on canvas on board, 48 x 36"Shears, who has lived in Santa Fe for three years—by way of Brooklyn, New York, and before that Boulder, Colorado—will be presenting several larger works in Still, including Taboret, a 50-by-40-inch work showing a table lit with harsh light that accentuates that shadows and forms at a play. “I love looking at my subject and treating the shadow as its own form,” he says. “James Joyce called it ‘aesthetic arrest’ and it describes that feeling in the high-contrast paint. High-contrast evokes a mystery in shadows, but so does low contrast, like [James Abbott McNeil] Whistler’s nocturnes. So much can be conveyed in the paint.”Stairwell at Dusk, oil on board, 20 x 16"

Other works in the show include Garage Reflection, a scene the artist walked past many times before finally committing to painting it, and WWI Helmet, which was inspired by a recent reading of Kurt Vonnegut’s book Slaughterhouse-Five. Still will be on view through July 3 at EVOKE. —

EVOKE Contemporary
550 S. Guadalupe Street • Santa Fe, NM 87501
(505) 995-9902 • www.evokecontemporary.com