The Late Follower

Shearer’s paintings often read as partial self-portraits. His subjects speak to the illusions (or disillusions) of suburban youth culture and heavy metal music—its flaunting of bourgeois mores and its implicit violence—in which the artist himself is well versed. His works are also replete with references to nineteenth-century Symbolist art, which reflected a desire to retreat from the modern world. Here, Shearer depicts an eerie fun- house arcade or basement recreation room that is also, in part, an artist’s studio. The subject at center might be a sculpture in progress, a mage, a rock star, or some fantasy fortune-teller whose ghostly eyes see past, present, and future folding into one.