Web

13 September - 9 October 2008

Liverpool Street Gallery

When Peter Sharp invites his audience to engage with shape and form derived from the arachnid’s web, he presents a challenging problem. There is little that unsettles humankind more and yet, he has not chosen the spider for its ability to instil fear. Rather, he has chosen this insect for its propensity to create the rhythmic patterns and sheer beauty found in its web. Dew-spangled and light as a breeze, the spider is the perfect angler of the sky and it is from this majesty that Sharp derives his abstractions.

Previous exhibitions within the artist’s oeuvre explore the integral relationship between microcosms and macrocosms. This is underpinned by Sharp’s tangible affinity with nature, which provides strength and experience to the paintings’ forms. Most palpably so in the Whale paintings where a singular line connotes a semiotic from Sharp’s visual lexicon: encompassing the passage of a whale as it crashes through the ocean; the curve of a whale bone found on a Western Australian beach; the personal associations the artist has with that discovery; and the enormity of human emotion linked to whales. The Spider paintings explore nature with the same complexity of experience, admiration and metaphysical determination that bring us just that bit closer to the dangerous precipice of experience.

Elegant, precise and without malice: the spider is an intrinsic part of growing up in Australia. From the St Andrew’s cross glinting between camellia bushes, to the huntsmen and funnel webs of backyard debris, we live with spiders in an uncomfortable truce. For Sharp, the spider is part of his idyllic recollections of youth, those moments between school and family where he was just a kid running down to the creek or beach to engage with nature, their propensity to harm was as far from his thoughts as any child’s. To a certain extent this remains so, the potential for harm is negligible, rather it is the paradox of inordinate strength with extreme vulnerability manifest in the precise geometry of the elastic grid that enthrals.

Meticulously drawn en plein air, the charcoal drawings embody the web and its incumbent dew as a spatial creation: a visual symbiont. In the major works, Sharp has reduced these drawings to the sparse and gestural lines of an extreme close up. He has further manipulated our expectation of nature by abandoning perspectival reference and displacing the emphasis from line to connection point. The revisited circular motif defines this nexus and ultimately the way we view the lines as conduits to the dots, rather than the dots determining the line. In doing so, Sharp controls and manipulates form within the composition.

The variety of media exploring textual and compositional elements Sharp utilises is exploited most fully in the paintings, where line and shape are distanced from their original execution. Oil and acrylic are worked in layers that have been built and scraped away to create a surface of metaphor and physicality. In Catch a roughly textured line of dark brown erupts from the corner claiming the proximal surface. Below lie trace lines of degraded paint, ghostly forms that exist as the bare matrix of construct reminding us of the ephemeral qualities of gossamer. The geometry of the web, with its modernist associations, creates square like voids, which the artist fills with flat dense colour. Deep and physically impenetrable they hold the picture plane from any suggestion of perspective without negating the surface activation.

Sharp’s symbolic use of motif and texture is further evinced in the print work Web Nocturne made in collaboration with Brenda Tye. With the intense immediacy of an action painting, it is in this work that the organic geometry and grid of the spider web is most overtly literal. Yet it is also the most simplified and loose of the works and allows grand gestural lines to glow with the radiance of moonlight on web. Their fragility is paramount as they shift in their imperfections, embedded in a surface of ink and carborundum, the artist’s hand visually supporting the swoop of contact with trails of glimmering residue.

Much like the spider-webs Sharp emulates, his sculptural work has a quality of dangerous elegance. Precariously balanced hardwood timbers rise from cores of sandstone, quarry foundlings and mason rubble. Hand cut and sawn on a friend’s property or scavenged from the arboreal flotsam of a neighbourhood tidy-up, Sharp transforms the raw timber without denying the medium its rough-hewn qualities. Brancusi-like curves are repeated to form pillars and silhouettes that couple the fragility of curvature with solid gravitas. The sculptures fill the studio like a forest of strength and line: the ‘daddy-long-legs’ of their combined verticality emphasised by the horizontal intricacies of the paintings beyond. In effect this combination presents a disjunctured overlay of line and form and presses the multi-dimensionality of the work into the room.

Sharp’s inaugural foray into the world of animation in collaboration with Alyssa Rothwell continues his dialogue with medium and process whereby the drawings are forced to comply within a new set of conditions. From a single drawing Sharp created seven versions, which have been transformed through Rothwell’s deconstruction and rebuilding process. Sharp sees the work as visually autonomous: “Alive, not a drawing and not a computer rendering, but something in between.” The work is elemental and simple, dirty, immediate and raw, and as Sharp puts it: “…has the clunky feel of something one of the boys from South Park may have drawn.”

The titles lead us back to the forms, giving story and narrative glimpses to decode the work —Brancusi’s Spider, Daddy-Long-Legs, Cicada, these are the titles of Sharp’s life. Drawn from the childhood glossary of fearsome “Little Miss Muffett” spiders, the benevolent “Charlotte’s Web” and innocuous “Itsy-bitsy spiders” of rainy days, spiders form part of our psyche. This is our Australian experience which Sharp, in his usual style, sends us tumbling headfirst to face.

-Gillian Serisier, Sydney 2008