I was fortunate enough to interview Steven Shearer a few years ago for his exhibition at the Brant Foundation. Their publicity team had reached out to ASX, and I was perplexed that they found us, given how most of our reviewing happens predominantly within the realm of photography, with some emphasis on painting and video on the rare occasion. I had to admit that I did not know anything about Steven’s work, but certainly knew of Peter Brant’s foundation, so I opened the press pack and was absolutely blown away by the work and frankly felt a little backward that I had not encountered it previously; for all intents and purposes, the work seems to be right up my street with its themes of metal-adjacent aesthetic, with insider jokes hinting at the juvelnalia of being a metalhead, those incredibly serious-at-the-time beliefs of rebellion and anti-establishment rhetoric becoming something viable in Steven’s work, a subscription to denim and suicidal inclination in contrary pastel. Much of this works itself out in the cultural consciousness by having Judas Priest on trial and the Satanic Panic of Steven and my youth in the 80s. I also come from an art history background and could immediately recognize his skill and his particular use of color, which he associates with the Fauves while also hinting at a love of occult art and symbolism.

Our interview tackles our crossover interests. In retrospect, the questions may have been a little over the top, but in many ways, that is possibly how I got Steven to open up a bit about the cultural and historical imperatives at work in his painting, for which I am still thankful. Regarding a more sober approach to his work, I think it is easy to speak of the cultural stimuli that shaped his themes, but slightly harder to pin down the art-historical context from which his inspiration might be drawn. Recently, I covered the work of Victor Man, another artist at David Zwirner, whose work also alludes to a tradition of painting in which decay, death, and cryptic, enigmatic tendencies are conveyed through subject matter and technical means, much like Shearer’s. Though different in approach, it left me casually browsing through art historical reference points, and I drew from the experience a series of questions as to why the fascination with what some may refer to as a garish palette has cropped up between these works and how the subject matter, enabled by their usage, has given everything a queasy look, in a art world that is not known for celebrating the wild untamed palette of such choices. It led me to look into the work of Symbolist painters as well as the Fauves.

There is an obscure type of saturnalia involved in the works that evoke something both allegorical and unnatural. Odilon Redon’s Cyclops, from the early decades of the twentieth century, was a first port of call for investigation, followed by William Blake’s painting, and finally a nudge towards the Fauves, with an emphasis on Paul Signac’s Portrait of Félix Fénéon, 1890. Though the Fauves are often applied to Shearer, even in self-reference, I find that this work, however adversarial in its technical color choices, extends beyond that group through his deliberate use of miasmatic, haunted, or necrotic subject matter. There is a prismatic mist in the background of much of his work, an evocation of aether that suggests a portal, or a conjuring at hand, less defined by finite shape and direct patterns of light on surface than by atmosphere and garishness. Color, when applied to landscape, however banal, in the case of Kandinsky or Matisse, breeds a feral type of reading. Otherwise bucolic landscapes, when pushed to the brink of recognizability by the pure use of conflated color choice, materialize at the ends of recognizability. When their palette is exaggerated, the base formula creates a chaotic interpretation of something otherwise mostly benign. In Shearer’s work, this can be seen in his portraiture, a conflation of color that pushes the psychological timbre of his subjects into unnatural territory.

What is spectacular about Shearer’s work is his ability to pull the viewer into his world, look for clues and reference points, and manage the inquest with a forensic eye. The carpet from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining materializes underneath a seated man. A Victorian train carriage emerges as a motif in several works, reminding one of Augustus Egg’s 1862 painting The Traveling Companions, a narrow precursor to Frederick Lord Leighton’s 1895 Pre-Raphaelite painting Flaming June, which no doubt has also influenced Shearer overall. In fact, to suggest that Shearer is an artist caught between Victorian painting and Robert Pickton’s farm would not be an overvalued statement. The beautiful nature of Pre-Raphaelite Victorian painting, mixed with contemporary subject matter and a Fauvist spin, lands the output squarely in the center. With that in mind, Shearer is also a fanatically organized artist. Rafre interviews and meetings with the artist in his Vancouver studio have attested to the environmental orderliness of Shearer’s domain, and that is likely a productive bulwark for the fever inside his head.

Finally, it would be remiss if we did not acknowledge that Shearer is still a product of his times, and his obsessive catalog of people sleeping, vernacular photography, and Internet archiving are well known. In this book, one is given a tantalizing yet effective overview of his reference material in a single small picture within the essays, which shows something like a nearly 20-volume bound reference library full of images that the artist has put together to draw from, a veritable Shearanica of the aforementioned images. It is a tantalizing image when we think of artists like Richter or Hans-Peter Feldmann, who have similar caches of news clippings and Atlas outlines tucked away in their studios. Seeing Shearer’s references, even in a small image, leaves me wanting to see more, and I am forever grateful to know they exist.

About the book itself, the publisher has done an incredible job with the catalog raisonné, though it is not quite that, but serves a similar purpose in showcasing a significant amount of Shearer’s process and the work itself. It feels like no expense has been spared, and it must have been a monumental job handled with aplomb by the team. As mentioned above, I can imagine Shearer’s eye for detail being significant, and to place this book into the world, it would have had to be handled with equal care by the publisher. It is a large volume full of work, but also expansive in its detailing, meaning the source material for production, file-size-wise, must have been significant and would have required a tremendous amount of publisher consistency to safeguard the work. If one side of artbook making rarely gets the requisitie spotlight, it is the publisher, who often goes to pain=staking lengths to make sure artists, galleries, museums, etc are all happy with the finished product and much of this relies on details, but also a strong hand in following the book through the many guides that work with it from file formating to printing to binding and finally distribution=publishers are often unsung heroes and it is worth noting here as such a large-scale book would need expert hands and eyes on the project to get a result like this.

Overall, this is a fascinating study of an artist in full command of their work, whose intricate talent and ability to draw on subculture-tangibly interesting subject matter- while also nodding to art history, produce an enigmatic and intriguing catalog of work with something like a mid-career survey at its heart. I feel that this is a significant book and that all parties have converged ont the project to make it the best it can possibly be. If you are interested in painting, subculture, or art historical extensions, this is designed with you in mind. I don’t personally believe in rating systems, but I can say that a kind of elegance exudes from the work, and I am overjoyed to have it adorn my shelves. GET IT!