McGrath’s work is refreshing, though, because it materializes the wonder of walking in the woods and a deeper sense that the world, minus humans, will be OK everything regenerates, as it does in Thomas Cole’s 19th-century Hudson River School masterpiece series “ The Course of Empire” (1833-1836), which might be the first American paintings warning of the Anthropocene. The show includes a few missteps: It’s overhung, and I could live without the fake-fur yeti figures that feel more like theme park mascots than sculpture. Rather than serious or apocalyptic, his work is warm and funny, like folk art or children’s drawings, and complemented by titles like “Intro to Hunting Gods,” “Spring Training for Witches,” “Redesigning Ghost Systems” and “Weekend Conference for Moons and Tiny Vampires.” (I discovered him on Instagram.) He was painting pleasingly anodyne landscapes and dark figures in the vein of Edvard Munch, and suddenly his work exploded with Day-Glo color and singing plants, unmoored in their compositions. McGrath’s work took a radical turn a couple of years ago. Scattered, wallpaper-like, across canvases whose titles nod to gods, witches and seasonal magic spells, his show “ Moon Riot” at Crossing Art thrums with laid-back spiritualist energy.
The artist Michael McGrath, who is based in Rhinebeck, in the Hudson Valley, paints what might be called the emoji landscape: screaming flowers surprised-looking insects and trees. Shear’s next direction may be signaled by the jewel-like, more solidly structured forms of “Match.” ROBERTA SMITH In the two larger spaces that follow, you may find that you’re able to resist and argue with more of them - at least for a while. The paintings in the show’s small first gallery are especially strong.
And soon thereafter, “Following Sea” - which gives the show its title - is again white on brown but solidly painted - a suggestion of whitecaps at sea or trailed white garments left on the floor. Although an end in itself, this work evokes the painting-study genre and its pleasures. Next to it, in “Door to Door” (2022), Shear lavishes loaded brushes of white, blue, brown and green across the surface - for a bit of forest stream, melting snow or rocky beach. There’s an end-of-summer sadness that’s a lot for a painting to sustain, but it does. It could depict outdoor furniture - an earlier a center of lively human interaction - abandoned on a beach as dusk darkens. “Same Day” (2021), the show’s first painting, isolates a short band of meager, wobbly white lines and two narrow horizontal shapes, midway on the right edge of a dark brown field. Small size is the only constant here otherwise, variations in color, suggestion, internal scale and style, prevail. You decide whether these ricochets hold your interest. Painting and title resonate in the mind and eye. Peter Shear’s little paintings resemble terse, challenging poems.
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