January 14, 2023 - February 25, 2023
The exhibition “Brian Sharp: The Wind Blew” opens January 14 and continues through February 25. Artist’s reception Saturday, January 14 from 2:00 to 5:00 pm at as-is.la.
“Poetics,” according to one old Structuralist, is largely a matter of reconciling “the pole of selection” with “the pole of combination.” Some hundred years later, and operating in a far more crowded media environment, Los Angeles painter Brian Sharp has come to a similarly stark conclusion: That making art might be a matter of finding things “hidden,” so to speak, in plain sight (selection) and then interpreting and presenting them in new and meaningful ways (combination). It is, of course, the very simplicity of this strategy, its obviousness and seeming passivity, that makes its successful execution so very difficult. Happily, Sharp is up to the task, as this exhibition of 22 small (8 x 8” to 20 x 16”) semi-representational / semi-abstract oil on canvas paintings convincingly demonstrates. Here, Sharp’s artworks “speak for themselves,” albeit in a dense and demanding visual language that places the full weight of interpretive responsibility where it properly belongs, on the shoulders of a necessarily patient and discerning art audience.
