Shawn Powell: Midwest Art Quarterly

Midwest Art Quarterly

Alex Vlasov

November 13th, 2024

Sometimes I find myself thinking about art as a drug. My highs always start with those formal elements that most readily present themselves; that's what has me hooked for life. Frank Stella once said that his art was “based on the fact that only what can be seen there is there.” Powell’s paintings can be pictures of specific things — pencils, cigarettes, hoses, fridges — but they are effective as essentially formal arrangements. They are what they are, and what is there is there: canvases of certain shapes and dimensions with colors painted on their surfaces. Their stripes and congruent shapes are finite in their properties; each painting is self-sufficient but follows a seemingly pre-determined formal logic bound by the edges of Powell's supports.

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