New York, NY— Sears-Peyton Gallery is pleased to present Sean Noonan’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, How to Slow Time. Noonan combines traditional painting methods with found material to define the energy of a single moment. These ten works painted over a ten-year period offer a critique of accelerationism.
Noonan is drawn to the practice of painting’s ability to embrace unpredictability and encourage deceleration in a world promising to speed up, guarantee known outcomes, and maximize efficiency at any cost. Noonan believes that in such a world, painting or creating of any kind feels like an act of protest. Its value lies in setting out without a fully known objective and gladly encountering tangents along the way in a process that is slow, and clunky, and filled with failures until something that resonates is finally revealed.
In “Haecceity”, 2022, Noonan’s different modes of painting come together as a symphony rather than mélange. Clear blue strokes appear organized in the center of the painting as the remaining composition pile on top of the found wood in navy and grey unbound marks. Time spent with Noonan’s paintings reveal the concentration required to make these series of loose gestures clear but unmethodical. This intense concentration has had a wonderful side-effect, something akin to the “Novelty Effect,” wherein the condensation of attention and discovery results in the brain recording rich, detailed experience memory: a luxurious sense of the slowing of time.
