Works by Dublin-born artist Seán Shanahan have long occupied a capacious salon at the Panza Collection in Varese, Italy. One of the most comprehensive and important collections of 20th-century art in the world, this alone bestows eminent imprimatur on Shanahan’s artistic oeuvre. But 2023 and the start of 2024 have proven especially busy for this painter, who has recently enjoyed exhibitions at Milan’s Building Gallery, Geneva’s Espace Muraille, Arezzo’s Fortezza Medicea and most recently, Madison Gallery in Los Angeles (with more shows in the works).
Why the renewed interest in Shanahan’s work? One theory: Because he has built a career on painting that assiduously eschews content and narrative, it offers a perfect antidote to the sheer tsunami of content that overwhelms us daily – the texts, images and videos of our social media feeds and the barrage of discouraging reports from political, environmental, racial and other fronts. Or perhaps his work refocuses our minds, distracted as they are from trying to balance the extraordinary complexities of the contemporary world.
Which is not to say that there’s anything simple about Shanahan’s work. Working for hours at a stretch, he applies wet oil paint over wet oil paint on panels of MDF, some nine feet square. “At first, you’re sort of skating on the surface,” Shanahan explains. “As the color is absorbed and penetrates, it’s more like you’re swimming in it.”
Clockwise from top left: “Refigured”; Untitled; “Float”; “Ritro”
He doesn’t stop until he achieves the febrile effect of recording the entire physicality of color as it moves from surface to depth. He cannot let pigments dry because that would create a solid paint layer that would partially obscure the fluidity of that movement from surface to ground. “I want you to know exactly what is going on,” he says. “There’s no goal in cheating you out of any possible part of the experience. I don’t want to hide my process.”
Depending on the colors he is using, completing a painting can be relatively quick or agonizingly protracted. “An earth tone has a certain opacity by its nature, so you arrive where you’re going in perhaps a day,” he observes. “But a volatile color like lavender or blue is very transparent,” meaning it can take up to a week of paint application to transmit the full voyage into the profundities of color.
Recently, Shanahan has incorporated beveled edges at the center and around the perimeters of the paintings, making them more sculptural. “If you’d shown me these paintings five years ago, I wouldn’t have recognized them as my own,” he admits of this new development. “They have a strange sense of infinity to them, and an emptiness and fullness that almost contradict each other.” Yet as deeply into voids of color that his former paintings travel, the new work feels like he has broken through still further into new dimensions of reality.
Photography by Luca Casonato, courtesy of Madison Gallery.
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