Yet, although the artist\u2019s signature has long been relegated to the back of the canvas, the history of abstraction in North America has long been characterized by the search for a \u201csignature style.\u201d Personal marks or motifs served to definitively link non-representational visual expression with an artist\u2019s identity and personhood. Abstract Expressionists such as Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwell sought a distinct form that would take the place of a scrawled name tucked at the canvas\u2019s edge. Barnett Newman wanted to find a form that would be unique to his work and isolated the \u201czip\u201d as a compositional device that helped distinguish his abstractions from the work of other painters. Many contemporary painters take a related approach, seeking unique techniques of paint application that are immediately recognizable in a crowded art fair or bustling group show opening.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Peter Shear, by contrast, is an artist who resists the equation of abstraction with a signature style, material, or technique. Typically described as \u201cself-taught\u201d in gallery press materials, Shear has spent innumerable hours looking at works of art. His paintings synthesize the diversity of his aesthetic influences. They are, for lack of a better word, surprising\u200a\u2014\u200aone painting does not lead logically to the next; rather, they skip and jump, like changing the channel or, in Shear\u2019s telling, like scrolling through disparate image sources in an endless social media feed. Not only do his paintings lack a literal signature, but they also slip away from any easily identifiable stylistic groove.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Take two paintings as an example. In Duel <\/em>(2024), two wide swatches of green sweep from right to left before converging at a small point. Deep teal squiggles evoke shrubbery or distant mountains, and a dashed pair of grey and tan lines imply a bend in the road. Initiative <\/em>(2024) forgoes even a hint of landscape to show two clusters of four small white dabs of paint on an even beige ground. They sit off-kilter like an abstract motif that has gotten lost in the crowd. The lower cluster sits uncomfortably, skewered by a gauzy black brush stroke. Although both of these paintings are small in scale, perhaps Shear\u2019s most consistent formal choice, their pictorial constructions could not be more distinct.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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$\"Peter$
Peter Shear<\/strong>
Duel<\/em>, 27,9 \u00d7 35,9 cm, 2024.
Photo: Evan Walsh, courtesy of the artist & BLUM, Los Angeles, Tokyo & New York<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
When walking into one of Shear\u2019s exhibitions, it isn\u2019t clear that one artist made all the works hanging on the walls. Shear shares this quality with a long lineage of artists who have worked against the commercial and historiographic imperatives for recognizability. Rochelle Feinstein, Thomas Nozkowski, and Candida Alvarez, to name only a few, also pursue abstractions that unfix form rather than reifying identity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There are precedents for these contemporary artists. For example, art historian Anne Wagner has described Lee Krasner\u2019s various techniques of refusing to sign her work, signing it with the androgynous initials \u201cL.K.,\u201d or hiding her signature within the patterns of her all-over paintings: \u201cThese stratagems are, on one level, a resistance to her art being identified and thus seen as \u2018that of a woman.\u2019\u201d^{1<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 1 <\/a> - Anne M. Wagner, \u201cLee Krasner as L.K.,\u201d Representations<\/em> 25 (Winter 1989): 48.<\/span> In other words, Krasner\u2019s various refusals to make her work legible as a marker of her identity became, in Wagner\u2019s analysis, a strategy of aesthetic survival. The continual risk for Krasner was that the paintings would not truly be seen behind the social identifications that she carried as a woman and as \u201cMrs. Jackson Pollock.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Popular discourse has often equated abstraction with a sense of freedom. The lack of imperative to depict, this theory would seem to say, means that the artist and the visual form of the abstract picture are unmoored from responsibility or constraint. Unlike the limited reception that Krasner received, Pollock\u2019s early \u201call-over\u201d works were heralded as a newly liberated form of good old American painting in the pages of Life <\/em>and the Partisan Review<\/em>, offering abstraction as a visual representation of freedom for the American middle class and intelligentsia alike. The gendered dimensions of this freedom were never far afield: as the art critic Lane Relyea points out, a few years after Life<\/em>\u2019s full spread on Pollock, the magazine treated Helen Frankenthaler\u2019s pour paintings as akin to decorative wallpaper and floor coverings.^{2<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 2 <\/a> - Lane B. Relyea, \u201cThe Apollonian Domestic,\u201d in \u201cThe heroine Paint\u201d: After Frankenthaler<\/em>, ed. Katy Siegel (New York: Gagosian\/Rizzoli, 2015), 116.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Yet the freedom that abstraction seemed to promise was, from the start, not only threatened by the decorative, the queer, and the feminine\u200a\u2014\u200aa perception most memorably and anxiously rehearsed by Clement Greenberg\u200a\u2014\u200abut also by the market.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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For even as Pollock\u2019s canvases were lauded as formal breakthroughs\u2026 Well, you can\u2019t sell a new breakthrough every week. Pollock and countless abstract artists afterwards would find that the pressures of the market demanded a recognizable painting. If it wasn\u2019t signed, after all, what was the point in spending good money on a picture that no one would recognize?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I want to make the case here that Shear\u2019s painting\u200a\u2014\u200aand that of the lineage of artists I identified above\u200a\u2014\u200ais not about freedom. It turns, instead, on a tactical resistance to the very essence of the signature: its recognizability. A signature, whether on a painting or a marriage license, certifies the presence and approval of a specific individual. To do so, it must be repeatable and recognizable, at least nominally. Signature styles work the same way\u200a\u2014\u200athey ensure the identity of the maker through a recognizable set of forms, materials, or techniques that are not easily copied by another hand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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$\"Peter$
Peter Shear<\/strong>
Continuity<\/em>, 30,5 \u00d7 30,5 cm, 2023.
Photo: Evan Walsh, courtesy of the artist & BLUM, Los Angeles, Tokyo & New York<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Jacques Derrida points out how the signature both implies the \u201cnonpresence of the signer\u201d and serves as a guarantor of authentic presence.^{3<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 3 <\/a> - Jacques Derrida, \u201cSignature Event Context,\u201d in Limited Inc.<\/em>, trans. Samuel Weber and Jeffry Mehlman (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 20.<\/span> In other words, the signer must be both present to sign the work (and therefore to guarantee its authenticity) and, later, absent for the signature to have any meaning or validity. For example, to sign a contract, someone must be there to sign it; but for the signature to have any sense, the signer must depart. If the signatory and the contract were present together forever, there would be no need for the autograph.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It is this impossible tension that haunts the majority of abstraction today: the painting works as a sign of freedom\u200a\u2014\u200awhether freedom of thought, aesthetic freedom, political freedom, sexual freedom, or any freedom at all\u200a\u2014\u200awhile it is at the same time bound to the imperative to be reproducible, and, above all, recognizable. Pollock\u2019s paintings, for example, need to both ensure Pollock\u2019s physical presence at some point in the past (a Pollock made by someone else would be the collector\u2019s greatest fear: a fake) and take on the role of representing Pollock in his absence. Yet modernism took the signature at face value, in the way a legal contract does today. Derrida points out how the aporia at the heart of the signature\u200a\u2014\u200athe simultaneous guarantee of physical presence and the requirement of the signer\u2019s absence\u200a\u2014\u200amakes a coherent identity impossible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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$\"Peter$
Peter Shear<\/strong>
Convenience<\/em>, 21 \u00d7 25,7 cm, 2023.
Photo: Evan Walsh, courtesy of the artist & BLUM, Los Angeles, Tokyo & New York<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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$\"Peter$
Peter Shear<\/strong>
Verb<\/em>, 41 \u00d7 45,7 cm, 2024.
Photo: Evan Walsh, courtesy of the artist & BLUM, Los Angeles, Tokyo & New York<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
In this sense, Shear\u2019s paintings refuse the qualities of reproducibility and recognizability that the signature demands. Or, more precisely put, Shear\u2019s work takes up the aporia that Derrida details. Identity, as any victim of identity theft knows, is always uncertain. The parade of documents required to \u201cauthenticate\u201d a painting by Pollock, for example, or the meticulous bureaucracy necessary to rescue one\u2019s identity from its dispersal into the recesses of the dark web, show this instability. We put so much effort into ensuring the identity of the artist precisely because that identity is so fragile. Take Shear\u2019s Convenience<\/em> (2023), which evokes a range of references from the history of handmade geometric abstraction. A cerulean blue bar hovers within a slightly larger, grey-blue rectangle at the centre of the top edge, all placed atop\u200a\u2014\u200aor is it under?\u200a\u2014\u200aa mottled ivory ground. Paintings by Giorgio Morandi and Robert Ryman flash to mind, but so do the vibrant labels of energy drinks and the defunct configurations of floppy disk drives. But the rules of engagement that Shear establishes in Convenience <\/em>hold true only for a moment. Instead of sedate rectangles, Verb<\/em> (2024) offers a dense thicket of brush strokes in muddy greens and blues that converge on a bright dash of tinted yellow. This painting speaks more to the work of Joan Mitchell. Like many of Shear\u2019s paintings, it also toys with the viewer\u2019s sense of compositional clarity. The picture refuses to resolve easily, and instead keeps us looking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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$\"Peter$
Peter Shear<\/strong>
Forced Perspective<\/em>, 58,4 \u00d7 41 cm, 2023.
Photo: Evan Walsh, courtesy of the artist & BLUM, Los Angeles, Tokyo & New York<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Shear\u2019s work prompts a set of questions about what, exactly, abstraction\u2019s task is today. If abstraction does not promise freedom, what can it offer? Why, in other words, is it worth pursuing, when so much in the world demands visibility? Abstraction\u2019s unending potential lies precisely in its capacity to insist on our intimacy with the unrecognizable. This is not an evocation of the sublime or a feint toward transcendental escapism; the small scale and straightforward art-store materials of Shear\u2019s work reject these kinds of grand aspirations. In many ways, this phrasing\u200a\u2014\u200ato be intimate with the unrecognizable\u200a\u2014\u200ais an echo of old ideas about abstraction\u2019s possibility as an avant-garde form that broke with the strictures of traditional subjects and styles. Yet the impossible tension between recognizability and freedom with which abstract art has struggled under contemporary market conditions have meant that grand claims of freedom were never, could never have been, fulfilled\u200a\u2014\u200anot for those who lay outside of the ideals of masculine vigour that Pollock and others epitomized.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
To be intimate with the unrecognizable is, in many senses, a far humbler task. But today, when every click we make online and every in-person interaction is collected and categorized to make our data and consumer profile quantified, recognizable, and salable, any chance we have to practise being with something we cannot fix down is invaluable. How else would we learn that we, too, can be unknowable? If abstraction\u2019s political possibility lies in its capacity to ask us to be intimate with the unrecognizable, as I maintain, then Shear\u2019s work contributes to a radical and ongoing diasporic community of painters who have attempted to undercut abstract painting\u2019s status as visual brand in favour of the wild openness of the unknown.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In his current book project, art historian and writer Brian T. Leahy examines the impact of press releases on the form and content of contemporary art. Leahy lives in Montana.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Few contemporary painters sign their work on the\u00a0front. One of the first lessons I remember receiving in an undergraduate painting class was that we should never, under any circumstances, sign a painting on the front. A scrawled signature tucked neatly in the lower right-hand corner of the\u00a0picture plane, the professor implied, was the most obvious marker distinguishing a self-taught painter of kitschy abstractions from the serious efforts of\u00a0artists who imagined themselves in the lineage of\u00a0great abstract painting.<\/br>","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":268341,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[882],"tags":[],"numeros":[7491],"disciplines":[],"statuts":[],"checklist":[],"auteurs":[7422],"artistes":[7475],"thematiques":[],"type_post":[319],"class_list":["post-268348","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-post","numeros-114-abstractions-en","auteurs-brian-t-leahy-en","artistes-peter-shear-en","type_post-principal"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/268348","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=268348"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/268348\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":268830,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/268348\/revisions\/268830"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/268341"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=268348"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=268348"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=268348"},{"taxonomy":"numeros","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/numeros?post=268348"},{"taxonomy":"disciplines","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/disciplines?post=268348"},{"taxonomy":"statuts","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/statuts?post=268348"},{"taxonomy":"checklist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/checklist?post=268348"},{"taxonomy":"auteurs","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/auteurs?post=268348"},{"taxonomy":"artistes","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artistes?post=268348"},{"taxonomy":"thematiques","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/thematiques?post=268348"},{"taxonomy":"type_post","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/type_post?post=268348"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}