ART: Brian Sharpe, Acme Gallery

SEEING, LOOKING, REFLECTING - doing this well is the best revenge

   “Looking at pictures is one of the ways in which you increase the pleasure … of living in a visual world.... It’s not a narcotizing pleasure. It’s the pleasure of having more sense made of our experience of the world.” - Robert Hughes, art critic, dies at 74

A good review from David Pagel in LAT on 6-29 prompted me to go- plus curiousity about simple-looking geometric paintings.  

"Brian Sharp’s simple little paintings lack the razzle-dazzle that plays such a big part of so much contemporary art, not to mention the get-it-now drive that defines so much of life in the big city, where people seem to have become addicted to instantaneous communication. 

At ACME, the L.A. painter’s two-tone abstractions throw a monkey wrench into the machinery of swift message-sending, giving pause to visitors whose seen-it-all attitudes and know-it-all mind sets are visited by just a whiff of doubt when in the presence of Sharp’s hard-edged compositions.At ACME, the L.A. painter’s two-tone abstractions throw a monkey wrench into the machinery of swift message-sending, giving pause to visitors whose seen-it-all attitudes and know-it-all mind sets are visited by just a whiff of doubt when in the presence of Sharp’s hard-edged compositions. 

At ACME, the L.A. painter’s two-tone abstractions throw a monkey wrench into the machinery of swift message-sending, giving pause to visitors whose seen-it-all attitudes and know-it-all mind sets are visited by just a whiff of doubt when in the presence of Sharp’s hard-edged compositions.

That niggling sense of uncertainty is the heart and soul of Sharp’s unassuming art, which sidesteps the industrial-strength seriousness of much geometric abstraction and the pumped-up physicality of installation-scale painting. The cavalier outlook of slacker abstraction is nowhere to be found in Sharp’s carefully crafted works, nor is the autobiographical impulse of narcissistic art.

Gentle and intimate, Sharp’s quietly engaging paintings are especially effective at deflating claims made about them, both positive and negative. To talk big about them is to misunderstand them. Even those that measure 55-by-44 inches avoid the assertiveness that we associate with strength. In a sense, all of Sharp’s works fly under the radar of language, where they make a little space for a kind of attentiveness that is its own reward.

Nearly, but not quite symmetrical, their carefully skewed compositions stimulate the human desire for both order and freedom. Their odd yet spot-on color combinations — forest green and tangerine, banana cream and golden yellow — make life richer by making the little things matter without overdramatizing their import.

Few paintings are more sensible. Or more satisfying."

SO, I’D BE VERY HAPPY TO HAVE SOMEONE WRITE THIS ABOUT MY PAINTINGS.