Abattoir is pleased to present Triangle, Circle, Square, Shawn Powell’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. This show continues Powell’s exploration of previous themes that question the artifice of painting—abstraction, representation, the subject as decoy. Always keen on everyday objects, Powell renders his subject matter with a signature delightfully deadpan manner, enlarging detailed views of pencils and cigarettes into weighty presences on canvas. He invites close analysis and the pleasure of simple looking simultaneously, layering art historical references onto uninflected close-ups that shift legible forms into the abstract.
The elementary shapes of triangle, circle, and square, organize the show. Powell’s intention is to break away from seeing the flat canvas as a rectangular window, and all the pictorial associations of that art historical device. Shaped canvases thus assert that Painting is their subject, while detaching the narrative from the subjects depicted. The titles underscore the abstract nature of the works-a trampoline becomes “Black Monochrome”, pencil erasers become “Four Pink Circles on a Blue-Violet Background”, and a scarf held to a rope by a clothes pin becomes “White, Black, and Green Rectangles on a Blue Background”. A pipe is not a pipe in Powell’s work.
Playfully quoting a wide range of contemporary painters, the works are often humorous and a bit absurd. This painted world, inhabited by a cast of ordinary things, draws the viewer into the experience of conceptual or reductive abstraction, distilled consideration of pure color, shape, line, composition, and pattern. Powell’s work is a tightrope walk between genres, performing a bait-and-switch where quotidian objects shed their narrative connotations and dissolve into disembodied form.
