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Long discussed as ironic kitsch - literally: "These are some of the worst paintings you will ever see" Searle - Shaw's thrift store finds have been slowly encroached by contemporary painting circling it. See "“Pharmacy for Idiots” at Rob Tufnell. Paintings' last five years seems close, if more proficient, to these vernacular imagists. The surrealism of today's painting mirrors the fact that any of the medium, in quantities vast enough, begins plotting points of the cultural unconscious. If you amass enough hand made images you begin so see dreams emerge. Painting, a virtual box that you fill with what you desire, but the desire is, if not caged, steered around themes that can be inferred by the collection circling around them. You can't see the pier but you can see the fish circling around them: the nude, Jesus, the phallus, pink things, us. Shaw's collection is like Wade Guyton's ostensible promise of printing our dreams, the conveyer of painting collecting like flypaper a civilization's subconscious. These are better much better most.
See too: Wade Guyton at Friedrich Petzel, “Pharmacy for Idiots” at Rob Tufnell, Tala Madani at David Kordansky