Over Here

Over Here is the second solo show at The Hole of paintings by Eric Shaw. Eleven scintillating new canvases will dazzle your eyes and scramble your brains as this digital-era abstract painter levels up. Using semi-familiar forms culled from logos and signage on the streets of New York, Shaw riffs on and remixes a repertoire of shapes and color gradients. Sketching on his phone in a rudimentary drawing program and bonking back and forth between screen and canvas, the artist invents and elaborates without a sketch or plan as his ideas proliferate. A mind-boggling cathedral of tape is used to paint all these perfect bits of color and the order of operations so that no bits overlap is bonkers. A string of discs weaves through a 49-color fountain in one work, and I defy you to figure out how the artist puzzled through it. The mathematical and geometric precision of the works presents in stark contrast to the playfulness, improvisation and joy in the compositions. Like Peter Halley or Jonathan Lasker, Shaw is not after abstraction purity tests and instead presents a semi-pictorial abstract arrangement in space. This suite of paintings feature exotic elaborations of discs that suggest poker chips or Pachinko machines in their suggested motion. Fountain motifs continue in this new body of work as do petri-dish structures and inner ear bone Yves Tanguy times. Eggs, pendulums and lolly-pops; feathers, fans and organelles: your brain and eyes continue over the compositions with nowhere to rest but everywhere to get activated.