Entering into a painting by Mark Sharp is like stepping into a cave filled with mysterious objects. Are they jewels, those brilliantly colored oblongs that glow with febrile intensity? Are they radiant boulders, stacked into intriguing patterns? Or are they tiny cell structures wrought huge by some phantasmal microscope?
They might be any, or all of these things. Sharp leaves it for you to decide. Then again, they may simply be shapes painted on canvas: forms with rounded edges; light, bright masses, outlined in dark blues, browns, purples and blacks—variations on a theme that is purely formal and abstract. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes an oblong is just an oblong. Part of the fun of these paintings is they can work in a variety of ways.
Sharp is an artist with deep affinities for the Abstract Expressionists and Color Field painters. He counts Wassily Kandinsky, Hans Hofmann, Joan Mitchell and Robert Natkin among his paint-reveling antecedents. In Sharp’s canvases, we find the same reverence those painters had for the physicality of their materials, along with a devotion to the purest visual essentials: color and design.
Abstract though his work may be, Sharp has never wholly abandoned a connection to landscape. That is why, he says, there is always a top and a bottom to each canvass, a quiet homage to gravity. Maybe that’s also why we can imagine his paintings as natural environments in the form of caves, quarries, or grottoes. In such protected places, which seem at once outside of time and at the heart of it, the architecture of earth, water and ancient stones blurs the distinction between nature and artifact.
In Sharp’s canvases, we sometimes find echoes of Will Barnet and those artists known in the 1940s as the Indian Space Painters. His imagery shares with theirs an emphasis on rounded, organic forms, a shallow picture plane and close attention to negative as well as positive space. Combined, these elements can evoke a sense of the sacred, as if one had stumbled upon an ancient burial site where the spirits still preside.
Yet color, more than anything else, is Sharp’s dominant language. He is, first and foremost, an unabashed colorist. His paintings pop with hues that make strange but exciting bedfellows. Lime greens vibrate against cadmium oranges and cobalt blues, as intense as stained glass windows at noon. Sunflower golds cohabitate with citrus yellows, ochers and burnt umbers. Sometimes powder blues and lipstick pinks crash the party, like wonderfully gauche teenagers.
Sharp’s color juxtapositions can be seductively beautiful, or they can jar, like musical passages played intentionally out-of-key. Either way, they act on us, eliciting physical and psychological responses. At the same time as they engage the retina they touch the brain and nervous system, firing little explosions of pleasure and pain. Perhaps that is why we return to these works again and again. Sharp’s paintings transport us into altered states.