Steven Shearer is a quiet man. He\u2019s elusive, too, shy and reclusive. He is difficult to pin down for an interview. And once you have, it is tough to get him talking. Maybe the Canadian artist thinks his work \u2013 spanning 40 years and multiple media, including stunning paintings of long-haired teens, collages of appropriated images, and billboard-sized poetry inspired by heavy metal lyrics \u2013 speaks for itself. But Shearer\u2019s work doesn\u2019t really speak, at least not clearly; it mumbles awkwardly into its sleeve like a goth at a family Easter picnic.<\/p>\n
\u201cI wrote down lots of potential things to say,\u201d he says from his immaculate white studio in Vancouver, ahead of his show at David Zwirner Gallery in London, his first UK exhibition since 2007, \u201cbut it\u2019s not my nature. All the hope or will to be able to communicate kind of goes into the pictures. And I try to stay out of the way once that\u2019s happened.\u201d<\/p>\n
Staying out of the way \u2026 Steven Shearer\u2019s studio, taken by the artist. Photograph: \u00a9 Steven Shearer Courtesy the artist, Galerie Eva Presenhuber, and David Zwirner<\/p>\n
And boy has he managed to stay out of the way. Somehow, he has never allowed any pictures of his face to find their way on to the internet (though you may find some that seem to be him). It\u2019s almost a shock to see the real Shearer isn\u2019t a gouty billionaire. He is handsome, fit and hip, his blond hair swept back as he deliberates over his answers and shows me slowly around his meticulous workspace with its huge collages, enormous printers and perfectly hung works in progress.<\/p>\n
He is nervous about the interview, \u201cbut I know you\u2019re sympathetic to what I do\u201d, he says. Surely he doesn\u2019t often encounter people unsympathetic to his work? \u201cI know people like it, but it\u2019s just better in some ways if I never talk to them. I\u2019ll meet collectors and they\u2019ll say: \u2018Oh, you\u2019re the only artist we\u2019ve collected that we\u2019ve never met.\u2019 I just think to myself, well, I\u2019ve ruined that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Despite his awkwardness, Shearer is a star in the art world. He has caused controversy with his giant images of sleeping people taken from the internet, shocked audiences with his gory poetry. But he is most revered for the depth and intensity of his painting, his art historical nous and conceptual rigour. With all his hypersaturated colours and lonesome portraiture, his references to teenage heavy metal obsessions and suburban loneliness, his work looks like Edvard Munch high on potent weed, or the fauvists drinking cheap cider in the woods behind school. It\u2019s art history through the lens of adolescent ennui and coming-of-age alienation, a stunningly painted heavy metal malaise.<\/p>\n
double quotation markI was sensitive as a kid. I could tell that there were some dark forces around<\/p>\n
I ask if he feels any kinship with the other great Canadian chronicler of suburban youth, Mike Myers, whose 90s comedy Wayne\u2019s World captured a very similar kind of teenage tedium. \u201cOh, yeah. I mean, it\u2019s a suburban experience, for sure. Not quite as dark, I would say.\u201d<\/p>\n
Darkness has been there from the start. Shearer was born in Vancouver, but grew up in Port Coquitlam, a blank suburban expanse on the eastern edge of the city. \u201cNothing too spectacular about it,\u201d he says, taking a long pause. Then adds: \u201cI lived not far from the serial killer Robert Pickton.\u201d Pickton murdered dozens of women and fed them to his pigs in the 1990s. \u201cI was sensitive as a kid. I could tell that there were some dark forces around. Sometimes, you\u2019d find things that were kind of questionable in the bushes and things.\u201d<\/p>\n
Was it that darkness that drew him to heavy metal? \u201cMusically, I was open to everything, but I think I was drawn to that really through the iconography, the imagery. I didn\u2019t have exposure to art as a little child, so I was into records and posters,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
Early death and black metal was low budget, extreme music made by bored teens in the suburbs. Their band photos were often ludicrously overblown \u2013 silly kids mucking about in the forest wearing makeup, pretending to be demons and zombies. Shearer takes those reference points and twists them, anonymises them, combines them with nods to art history, and repaints them over and over.<\/p>\n
Lonesome \u2026 The Pastel Tutor by Steven Shearer. Photograph: \u00a9 Steven Shearer Courtesy the artist, Galerie Eva Presenhuber, and David Zwirner<\/p>\n
If you know what you are looking for, you can untangle the references and spot a teenage Cliff Burton from Metallica, a young George \u201cCorpsegrinder\u201d Fisher from Monstrosity and later Cannibal Corpse, a blood-drenched Quorthon from Bathory, prog icon Rick Wakeman with the word \u201chash\u201d bleached into his hair, the four members of Obituary hanging from nooses. They trigger an almost Pavlovian response in me \u2013 Shearer\u2019s endless allusions to German Romanticism and extreme metal reflect my own passions and obsessions.<\/p>\n
But I\u2019m not his target audience. \u201cI like to imagine the ideal viewer is someone 40 years into the future who has no idea who anybody is in the pictures,\u201d he says. The obscure references help create a sense of almost cryptic distance. \u201cI\u2019m making these pictures, sending them out into the world, hoping that they can draw people into them. I want to make them universal.\u201d<\/p>\n
Shearer\u2019s figures have, for the most part, always been boys on the brink of manhood \u2013 long-haired youths caught between childhood and full-blown, testosterone-drenched adult machismo. They are androgynous, tense portraits of lonely kids. I ask about the fluid gender of his figures. Both his mother and uncle, who was transgender, painted, \u201cand I could never pick up on what the sexes were in the art that they made. But it\u2019s not a conscious construction, it\u2019s just my sensibility, what I\u2019m drawn to.\u201d<\/p>\n
Looking at the portraits and then back at him, they suddenly all look like the same person in different guises. Are they self-portraits? \u201cIt\u2019s part-anthropological, part-autobiographical.\u201d So they are a mixture of cultural fascination and self-reflection? \u201cThe fact that I never have somebody posing for the pictures when I make them, I guess in art history you\u2019d call them fancy portraits [a kind of imagined portraiture]. There\u2019s a genealogy that connects me with all of them.\u201d<\/p>\n
Something is different in the new works at David Zwirner, however. The healthy teens of the earlier paintings seem to have aged and withered. The figures are frailer, their hair is greying, their faces are lined with wrinkles, and one character is flanked by a pair of crutches. The reckless abandon of youth has been replaced with the fear and discomfort of middle age. \u201cYeah,\u201d he pauses again. \u201cI would say that\u2019s the case.\u201d And quickly he changes the subject.<\/p>\n
\u2018I\u2019m making these picture hoping that they can draw people into them\u2019 \u2026 Comely Cad by Steven Shearer. Photograph: \u00a9 Steven Shearer Courtesy the artist, Galerie Eva Presenhuber, and David Zwirner<\/p>\n
The paintings may be his prime focus, but they\u2019re far from the only thing he does. For decades he has been amassing a vast archive of images from the internet that he compiles into reference volumes and returns to again and again. It\u2019s the source of his Sleepers series, photos of people zonked out on couches and buses, archived by Shearer and blown up to massive proportions, transformed into symbols of death.<\/p>\n
Then there are his poems, inspired by the goriest, most transgressive of heavy metal lyrics, with lines such as \u201cfoul winds of putrefaction, evisceration of the altar\u201d and \u201csodomized by the cross, rapturous disembowelment\u201d, printed up to billboard size at the 2011 Venice Biennale.<\/p>\n
Both bodies of work have caused controversy and shocked audiences, but they are such a clear extension of Shearer\u2019s approach. It\u2019s what Nicholas Cullinan, the director of the British Museum, has described as a \u201cdouble cultural archaeology\u201d: Shearer is mining the past and archiving the present at the same time.<\/p>\n
But it is the painting that he keeps returning to. \u201cWhat I\u2019d like to harness is that, within a figure in a painting, you can see something that you recognise from your own experience. And then within it, you can see the lineage of people\u2019s lives and expressions and their fleeting moments in the past. For me, it\u2019s the culmination of everything I do.\u201d<\/p>\n
In painting alienation, angst and boredom, it seems he is not just painting portraits of himself, but portraits of us too.<\/p>\n