“Sean Cairns: Light Bearer” at SHRINE in New York City: Art Exhibition Review

Texas artist Sean Cairns’ painted scenes of nature in its element — populated only sparsely by a human touch or the ripple of it — reverberate romantically across a new exhibition at the art gallery Shrine in New York.

The wistful, singing, hopeful, and perfectly imprecise application of color — a lot of which pops dramatically — makes you feel the depicted places’ growing energy, as though they’re all starting to spill out of the artworks. It’s all free-flowing — what one could call painterly or, as the press release did, impressionistic.

Cairns’ palette itself touches on familiar hallmarks — like the purple and orange you see in a sunset — while spinning them outward with inwardly assured, stable drama. Nature becomes a slowly spinning merry-go-round; a colorful, perched amusement park ride. You end up feeling at home, but in a new place, brought by the artist into surroundings steeped in promise: both the making and the fulfillment of it.

You’re distinctly not where you started anymore, but it’s okay. The story is being told. The tale proceeds. The trees and waterways in the exhibited paintings nearly evade Cairns’ aesthetic capture, slipping out of the specific forms in which we’re used to seeing all of this, though the spirit is still present and greeting us. Cairns depicts the nature in these scenes with a rich, inner life and progression that move away from commodified, strictly delineated sense, instead blurring into clouds of enthusiastic color.

The nature showcases we find in Cairns’ art, which we might normally expect to feel fixed, instead look depicted in the midst of some kind of motion: an emotive, expressive, enrapturing, enlivening progression, even if not one actually moving a tree or a waterway from one materialized place to another.

The paintings are a blend of grounded location and emotional, expressive excavation, finding a harmony — a soaring and uplifting tone — to the disparate hums, growls, crackles, and light of the natural world itself.

Cairns’ imagery envisions light — the feeling of the thing on top of the vision-allowing, real presence of it — as emanating from within the many singing occupants of the scenes that he paints. These trees, waterways, and even the occasional structures built by humankind are propelled inwardly. They exist now as if of their own accord, and the song reestablishes itself in each instance.

It’s creation, and creation that you see laid out in front of you: moment atop moment, and the moments themselves eventually cast aside. Creation becomes a process without sequence, an intertwining web of interconnection in which each inhabitant or visitor to these scenes links to an esoterically sweeping cavalcade of others. It’s a shine… a surprisingly persistent, recirculating burst of color. It’s latent power made, visually, not so latent.

What Cairns paints looks like it’s going to burst out of its spatial seams; living things and that which isn’t technically alive at all so vibrantly themselves in each instance that they’re barely keeping it together, barely sticking to the familiar visuals that make the image of a tree, a waterfront, or even a house digestible. It’s somewhere else. It has a life, a progression, a buoying, inward call.

The washing waves of color permeating Cairns’ paintings are a straightforward, uninhibited cascade of materialized emotion. The colors, forms, and overall artworks are distinctly uplifting, and you feel not just home but an embodied, lived-in home. An innocence that persists, a purity at least of direction in the relentless push towards literal life held within and reflected by the natural world.

It’s something to which we’re inherently connected as living beings ourselves, and you feel that connection when you’re looking into Cairns’ stirring picturescapes. You feel the love, which Cairns sensorily manifests.

You end up feeling compassion for these pulsating, natural scenes, which we know that the handiwork of humankind has, out in the physical world, frequently left to struggle or be destroyed. Their desire to live persists beyond progression, but it’s there, and we’re a part of it. I hope we can see that.

Cairns’ exhibition continues through March 15.

Featured image: “Sean Cairns: Light Bearer” (installation view), SHRINE, New York, January 31 – March 15, 2025. Image courtesy of SHRINE and the artist.