JIM SHAW: Hope Against Hope

Simon Lee Gallery

| 30th October 2020

“At first glance it’s easy to be entirely caught up in the sensory thrill and stinging hot takes offered by this feverish parade of perverse pop. However, once the eye fixes in on any given work, the outlandish first impression melts away into penetrating subtlety.”

It is a drizzly and overcast Tuesday morning as I tiptoe through the towering and puddle-laden grey streets of Mayfair.  As I turn the corner and walk down Berkeley Street, the fond glow of luminous gallery walls greets me, punctuated with wonderfully jewel-toned and busy canvasses: a row of smiles coaxing me into the warm.

This exhibition of recent works by Los-Angeles based Artist Jim Shaw is entitled Hope Against Hope and is an idiosyncratic, kaleidoscopic romp through the tangled American consciousness.  The clash of symbolic allusions from comic books to politics to 1950s advertising feel like an encoded puzzle, at once sinister and auspicious, tugging restlessly at the viewer’s curiosity.  

 The works are painted over found theatrical backdrops and the bustling interplay of character and setting is at once satirical and operatic in flavour and scale.  In particular The Master Mason and Donald and Melania Trump descending the escalator into the 9th circle of hell reserved for traitors frozen in a sea of ice evoke a cutting series of damning indictments, where the artist seemingly revels in the role of cultural judge, jury and executioner.  

At first glance it’s easy to be entirely caught up in the sensory thrill and stinging hot takes offered by this feverish parade of perverse pop. However, once the eye fixes in on any given work, the outlandish first impression melts away into penetrating subtlety.

Shaw‘s appetite for illusion and sleight of hand is clear in The Beckoning where his magician alter-ego makes a reprise. The up lit and tuxedoed figure towers (perhaps menacing, perhaps beguiling) over The New York city skyline whilst straddling an illuminated church superimposed over his crotch.  The gentle shifts of tone and perspective strike me as alluding to the artifice of Wall Street money laundering or is religion our false panacea? This is a nuanced challenge to consider our own complicity and participation in the big ‘show’ of US and western excess.  As I stare the church seems to drill insistently into our souls: prophetically questioning whether our strongly held desires, beliefs and aspirations are built on the fragile and shifting sand of borrowed time and challenging us to find hope somewhere, somehow else.

Hope Against Hope is now on until 16th January 2021 at Simon Lee Gallery, 12 Berkeley St, Mayfair, London W1J 8DT.