Shawn Powell: New City Art

New City Art

Lane Cooper

November 15th, 2024

Robert Indiana is a specter in Shawn Powell’s work. Flat, graphic, working with the visual language of what is now vintage “commercial art,” Indiana played with signifier and signified and the slippage between the two. He explored imagery that was profoundly consumable and yet elusive, tap dancing all over a wafer-thin edge between concrete art and pure mimesis.

Powell’s work, like Indiana’s, operates on multiple levels: graphic, precise, reductive images. It’s an aesthetic that harkens back to carnival signs and the making of a kind of imagery that calls for visual clarity but also deception. His work, too, is profoundly consumable but Powell is a trickster. His work shifts between pure abstraction and the surprise of recognition.

“Four Yellow Circles on a Gray Background” at first reads as hard-edge geometric abstraction. The composition is reminiscent of Indiana, but then the white crescents in the corners provide context and four orange cylinders snap into focus… “Oh, I see now,” we say to ourselves. Around the gallery, his other works likewise reveal themselves. Everyday objects provide the sources for the images: an exercise trampoline, razor blades, clothesline and clothespins, cigarette butts, the eraser ends of pencils. All of these are artifacts from vaguely distant eras, but not the far-distant past, a more innocent time just out of reach. The works are cinematic stills from carefully composed scenes, and the absence of bodies exudes a sense of quiet. These are scenes that have become less present in our current digital, cacophonous era. There’s more than a hint of nostalgia in these playful, almost teasing works and it is, in part, this lightness that pulls us in.

You might see these works online and think that you’ve seen them, but that would miss the point. Up close and personal, they retreat from their flatness. It’s in paying close attention that Powell shows you what he’s up to. Only through looking, making an effort to see them, do the paintings reveal their delicately painted shadows; their patterns that double as green blades of grass; their crisp, excruciatingly clean, taped edges; and in general, the obsessive attention to infinitesimal, generally unseen, details. The profiles of the paintings’ canvases carry forward this theme of closely tended craft with the crisp taped edge contrasting to a fastidiously clean canvas.

It’s a beautiful show, one that creates a deeply satisfying essay on the nature of seeing and experience.

“Shawn Powell: Triangle, Circle, Square” is on view at Abattoir Gallery, 3619 Walton Avenue, Cleveland, Ohio, through December 15.

Visit the website.