Trevor Shimizu, Tulips (2023), via 47 Canal
Cycles, on view this month at 47 Canal, marks artist Trevor Shimizu’s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery, and a continuation of his enigmatic and studied engagement with disparate painterly languages. Presenting nine new paintings, varying in scale and unrelenting in spirit, the artist continues to push further through the genre model of landscape painting, and past his painterly personas.
Throughout his practice, Shimizu’s material has always been taken from life––all that a painter needs is at hand. The works in this exhibition depart from oft-humorous archetypes (such as Tired Dad, Disgruntled Artist’s Assistant, or Heroic Painter) and serial (occasionally scatological) subject matter. Instead they depict dense and familiar scenes of gardens, river views, and ocean vistas. His paintings embody the restlessness of day to day life, of life in between increasingly extreme seasons, and the cycles of a world just outside one’s window.
Trevor Shimizu, Cycles (Installation View), via 47 Canal
Trevor Shimizu, November-December 2022 (2023), via 47 Canal
Shimizu’s work here turns attention towards the landscape as a form and container of varied painterly tropes and frameworks. Working across various scales and focal points, the artist reveals the passage of time through the constantly changing backdrop of a backyard garden painted from intimate, unconstrained memory over periods of one month cycles. The quiet drama of dead leaves falling and clumpy snow overlay like stamps on various views in and of the garden. Heavy rocks, a stumpy hinoki tree, a stand of cheery arborvitae, and an adolescent redwood tree appear and reappear in the compositions as if circling the garden. Tulips and dogwood pop up in the spring and summer and are replaced by aster and sunflowers in the fall and winter.
Trevor Shimizu, Cycles (Installation View), via 47 Canal
Shimizu takes the passage of time and the language of the landscape and reworks them towards innately personal, abstracted gestures and movements. Blurs of color and swirls of brushwork make for a complex series of depths and perceptual entry-points that hint at a world lurking underneath the foliage. In some, the artist even superimposes multiple landscapes into one, the entire form giving way to the final image. Translating the landscape into both tool and perspectival concept, the artist creates new worlds from old forms.
The show closes April 29th.
– D. Creahan
Read more:
Trevor Shimizu: Cycles [Exhibition Site]
