If asked about his painting, Sean Shanahan would most likely resort to the following aphorism: «I am in an infinite ocean of color. I have the ocean all around and I take some in the palm of my hand: it is still ocean, but now it is no longer infinite ».

Shanahan's works escape the nomenclature, they even manage to slip it on, just like their shaped edges: acute as they are daring, capable of invalidating the traditional geometry of the “ sacred rectangle ”. They are uncut edges, which highlight the MDF support, but above all they serve to outline and rethink the threshold that tends to graduate the work towards the surrounding world. By redefining the boundaries of his own pictorial research, the artist manages to undermine any definition, giving rise to a geometry that disrupts tradition and that seems otherwise untranslatable.

There is an insurmountable boundary that keeps the painted surface at a distance from the surrounding reality. In Shanahan's works the edges modulate the passage from one to the other, thus sanctioning an approach and interpenetration between the pictorial work and the architectural context. The artist's monochromes never try to replace reality, they neither imitate it nor take it as a model; in them one never incurs illusions or inductions, in figurative or narrative connotations, the gaze is intercepted only by color, to seal the quintessence of painting.