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Paul Shakespear lives and works in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A native of Buenos Aires, Argentina, he was educated at Boston College,
the University of Manchester, and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts,
Boston.
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Journey of Enlightenment Boston Globe
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Paul Shakespear makes ravishing abstract paintings from up to 40 layers of acrylic medium. Many of his works at Howard Yezerski Gallery are topped off with a high gloss, and you get the sense that you're not looking at the painting but gazing into it, as you would into a deep, still pool. It's easy to think of gloss as slick, glib, and Pop-oriented, but Shakespear goes the opposite way. His works are deeply contemplative. “Tiger Mountain” has three parts. The first features a brooding plum tone shot through with electric blue. In the second, the blue rises and begins to disperse, brilliantly. The third is dark and streaked, resembling a jungle at night. The three describe a journey of enlightenment, from inkling to the “aha!” of understanding, which glitters before life again subsumes it. |
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| His matte-finished works also fascinate in their density. “Consequence,” a triptych, features a central panel that blends the slate quality of blackboard with the opalescence of mother-of-pearl. It's flanked by what looks like the stretched bark of a cherry tree on one side and an apparent slathering of melted Creamsicles flecked with earth on the other. Shakespear tirelessly experiments with the possibilities of his medium, and the further he goes, the more interesting his work grows. |
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Hub’s Hidden Gems Boston Herald
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In these works Shakespear continues to push himself in new directions. Adding to his always-nuanced surfaces and masterful understanding of color, Shakespear now turns up the notch on textural effects. Wringing some of the greatest variety of surfaces ever made with acrylic paint in a work such as “Il Poggio,” he places a handful of panels of layered colors so translucent they pass for glass above a highly textured surface. The result is a tightly locked balance of contrasts that tends to highlight
the strengths of the individual effects. Stark and elegant, like all the
works, “Il Poggio” encompasses an uncompromising wealth of visual
riches. |
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Indepth Works Boston Globe
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Paul Shakespear continues to plumb the possibilities of paint at Howard Yezerski Gallery. For this artist, it’s all about what he can make the paint do: squeegee it down the surface to a luminous, waxy sheen, dice it and slice it to a rocky three-dimensionality, or scuff it up to look like rusting metal. Like many of the works here, “San Sebastian” is a diptych.
The smaller horizontal panel on the top is an inky, midnight blue, with
drips of paint playing over an almost purple internal light. It's a shroud
of darkness, yet it glows. The square bottom panel sports layers of grays,
greens, and browns. Although painted on linen, you get the sense of wood
grain (indeed, when Shakespear paints on wood, you get the woven sense
of linen). Every panel of every painting captures polarities of light
and dark, depth and surface. They're a joy to see. |
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Review Art New England
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Insistently geometric—depicting abutting rectangles within rectangles—emphatic, and self-sufficient, Paul Shakepear's latest abstract paintings command their own space. This was true of Shakespear's last show as well, but here texture and
hue are pushed to challenging extremes, creating surprising, unexpected
juxtapositions. No longer do the colors and shapes primarily seem as if
they were formed by nature, cut from the Earth's crust, or inspired by
watery glades. Translucent passages, acid colors, and scratchy planes
have clearly been shaped, painted, and invented, and then, like a dialectic
challenge, set against more naturalistic sea greens, sky blues, or rusty
reds. |
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In one work, a strident, streaky white sandwiches a luminous blue square. In another, a hot, nuclear orange sides up to a grayish green, looking very much like a Whistler mist, punctuated by dark ciphers. In “Omero #2,” two rectangles—a rich, vibrant yellow and an amorphous bluegreen—are tensely balanced by an expanse of pocked and layered white, setting up a spatial dynamic between the forms. And although the structure is essentially abstract and geometric, the painting, like the rest of the works, projects an engaging physicality by way of color and surface atmosphere. In the end, these paintings are minimal without being austere, subtle and delicate, while brash and daring—like life itself. |
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Shakespear Traces Patterns from the Surface of the Eye Boston Globe
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Paul Shakespear explores the depth of surface in his new paintings at the Howard Yezerski Gallery. It’s as if he’s presenting us with all the activity that happens on the surface of the eye, all the slurries and floaters, shadows and bursts of light that we gaze through each day to see the world beyond us. The paintings are luscious, made of nearly transparent washes of acrylic
paint on wood panel, canvas, or linen. Most are diptychs and triptychs,
contrasting different textures, colors, and styles of painting. The juxtaposition
of these elements imbues each piece with a rhythm and a solid structure
through which the veils of color and texture can pour. |
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“Weir #2” sets a horizontal band of
wood coated in shifting layers of slate blue over a much larger painting
on linen, which has a mottled blue at its top. It drops, however, into a
hotter hue; the bottom looks violently streaked with rust, giving the piece
a corrosive quality. Apparitions of gray arcs roll amid the decay, spiriting
the viewer across the painting’s surface.
The top piece is smoother, and streaked with white, looking like a blinding mist over the sea with mere glimmers of clouds and hints of light peering through. It feels more solid and elegant than its partner, representing rest as opposed to torrid action. Often painters this concerned with surface hint at something in the deep distance as well—as if the surface were a veil shifting over some intangible truth. For Shakespear, that veil is packed with so much intrigue and truth itself, he need dig no deeper. |
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Catalogue Essay, 1997
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In this era of sound bites, cyberspace, and nano-second
attention spans, Paul Shakespear’s paintings seem almost anachronistic.
Unlike so much contemporary art, whose message comes clear in less time
than it takes to read this sentence, Shakespear’s paintings reveal
themselves slowly, changing and compounding their visual information as
well as their symbolic, metaphorical and metaphysical meanings over time.
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It is much easier to say what Shakespear’s painting is not than to define what it is. Shakespear doesn’t “fit” into contemporary aesthetics. His painting has no political message and no historical referents. Although his art historical influences cross numerous times and cultures, ranging from Vermeer to prehistoric cave paintings to Asian art, his work is hardly an “appropriative” post- modern melange. It is not pure painting-about-painting; neither is it abstract art with an underlying social critique. Rather, it is a translation of memory, nature and experience into a complex pictorial language. But if Shakespear functions outside artworld fashion, his paintings arise
from an art historical, and especially modernist framework. Like so many
in his generation, he was forged by minimalism. Shakespear’s early,
reductivist minimal efforts—big hard-edged shapes limned in strong
colors—long ago gave way to paintings of increasing intricacy. As
he observes, “I quickly became more interested in having more, rather
than less, in a painting.” For Shakespear, the limitations and parameters
of minimalism acted as a kind of springboard for ever more complicated
imagery. |
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Nevertheless, the paintings initially seem straightforward. This seeming simplicity derives from an adherence to classical geometric and architectonic principles. Both of Shakespear’s parents were engineers, and Shakespear, who has done both design and construction work, considered being an architect. That legacy is evident in the recent works, all of which are divided in a binary fashion into two adjacent rectangular panels. The paintings seem to be two monochromatic fields; “Long Point,” for example, appears to be an unambiguous juxtaposition of white and green rectangles. But the “green” section is composed of multiple layers of acrylic pigment, including ultramarine, red ochre, yellow ochre, burnt and raw sienna, each mixed with varying amounts of gloss medium and modeling paste. Applied with a trowel, brush, rags or the fingers over lengthy time periods, the layers are scraped with a knife to produce a final compound, highly translucent, glossy surface. This process is not visible to the eye, but its tracings and pentimenti are revealed to the contemplative viewer. Shakespear’s paintings elicit this sort of meditative response, inviting the viewer to experience their metamorphic nature. Although Shakespear avoids literal figuration, he views the surface as a living thing. He cites Titian’s ability to conjure “the mysteries of the flesh” as a touchstone. He strives to treat the surface as if it were flesh; as something tactile, sensual and expressive. Rich with incident and intimation, these works have a vitality born of enormous compression. Similarly, the drawing Shakespear embeds into the surfaces is at once
elusive and involving. Shakespear’s imagery is not representational,
not specifically organic, not cleanly geometric. Like the paintings’
surfaces, the drawing is filled with latent and transfigured meanings.
In “Phase,” for example, the pod-like shape in the left blue
panel suggests the organic world, especially seeds, fruit and fertility.
But its ethereal blue setting and the nervous lines swirling around it
suggest something cooler, perhaps interplanetary. The echo of this form
in the right white panel underscores the notion of memory; the sense of
motion and metamorphosis throughout implies that experience, memory and
impression are constantly in flux, evolving with an inner life of their
own. |
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These composite surfaces and images are culled from Shakespear’s well of experience. Extensive travel (including trips to England, Italy, Spain, Mexico, Siberia, and Japan), nature-oriented activities, plus “everything I’ve looked at for the last forty years” all find their way into the paintings, as if processed through “a giant funnel in the top of my head.” Shakespear’s “memory bank” is enriched by an idyllic childhood in Argentina, where Shakespear’s family lived until he turned seven. Shakespear remembers Buenos Aires as “a very beautiful world of parks, lagoons, outings and playing all the time, a kind of golden age of childhood.” Shakespear has brought those idealized memories into the paintings, resurrecting in pictorial terms a golden world of sensuality and feeling. The paintings invite viewers to enter that world, where sensation and emotion are constantly changing, and constantly wondrous. Nancy Stapen is an art critic living in Boston. |
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Shakespear in Love with Boston Herald |
As the work on view at the Howard Yezerski Gallery
reveals, Paul Shakespear continues to produce some of the most enigmatically
beautiful paintings in contemporary art. Suggestive fields of coloristic
reveries, his abstract paintings are like luminous poems. Beneath their
glassy smooth, densely layered surfaces, a sensitive, chromatic rhythm slowly
unwinds. |
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Beginning with “Mar”s shifting permutations
of red—seemingly cloaked in a veil of darkness—and continuing
throughout his multipaneled paintings, Shakespear’s abstractions repeatedly
produce a state of awe. The surface of his diptych, “Shift,” for
instance, is a slow, pleasurable revery. White, branchlike forms eerily
spread across one panel; on the other, a moody, verdant green shimmers.
Together, the two create a distinctly rich counterpoint of moods.
Although abstract, the paintings seem inspired by landscapes—water, trees and forests. Nature’s unpredictability is evident in the panels’ revealing edges, where underlayers of paint are left exposed. These layered revelations also suggest a sense of geological time. In addition, with Shakespear’s reduction of imagery to fields of close-valued, palpable color, a sense of light—the passing nuances of either sun- or moonlight—reverberates within the paintings.. But, above all, a romantic impulse permeates the work, a taste for luxurious sensation and a lingering sense of distant memories—the kind evoked by specific colors, tones and shapes. The paintings intimate; they never declare. Playing on resonant sensations and painted with a highly refined sensibility, Shakespear’s paintings are a sobering reminder of the power of pictorial possibility. |
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