Mark Shark

Mark Sharp				Small Works Gallery			May 26 - June 20, 2007

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	Mark Sharp: Musical Abstraction Mark Sharp's musical abstractions lend themselves to repeated investigation; his introspective explorations look to a musical background—his father was a professor of music—that the viewer experiences as variations on a theme. Sharp's elegant compositions draw on gestural markings influenced by the abstract expressionists, whose nuanced painterly activities he seems especially close to. But if it happens that he looks to a painter like de Kooning for suggestions, it is also true that he is very much his own person; his paintings are filled with an independent idiom--curving, elliptical images, often enhanced by black outlines, that bear up under the viewer's scrutiny. His art is enhanced by its iteration, which enables him to closely follow his forms and thoughts, according to a language that veers and twists in areas of subtly modulated colors. It is a vernacular that is, at the same time, historically aware and very contemporary; Sharp leads his audience into a maplike design, in which the shapes ride up and abut each other in ways that suggest the exquisite persuasiveness of nature, the hills and valleys, foliage and stone of the landscape as it is known. The artist becomes in these works an interpreter of painting in the tradition of the New York School as well as an explorer of nature; his canvases and works on paper glow with muted earth tones. Their highly energetic surfaces act as a record of Sharp's activities, much as a palimpsest contains the visual ghosts of earlier writing. This allows him to continue within his determination to get the imagery down, in ways that lead the viewer up and around the patches of color and the black skeins that act as intermediaries between shapes and hues. His pronouncements are not limited to color alone, although it is a strength of his painting; the linear maintains itself in arabesques that move in and out of shadow, tracing patterns that are abstract but also lend themselves to an approximation of the world as we experience it. Abstraction has been a viable expression for close to a century now, beginning with analytic cubism. Sharp maintains a close relationship to that history, which has given him the means with which to follow his path. He continues to believe that painting is a meaningful activity, even if contemporary art is being overrun by conceptual intellectualization. Sharp makes it clear that he believes in the importance of painting, its ability to define both the artist's imagination and the quiet beauty of what he sees. Jonathan Goodman Jonathan Goodman is a writer who specializes in contemporary art. Based in New York, he currently teaches at Pratt Institute and the Parsons School of Design.