Variations (2011)

As Things

Colours are ubiquitous. We cannot help but notice everyday things around us by way of their colours. We even allow colours to infiltrate language — red herring; green with envy; turning blue (maybe literally) …

This very commonplace sense of colours can serve to obscure the immense variation and complexity of colours as a visual phenomena. We tend to assume that one green-coloured object is similar to any other green-coloured item — or close enough for us to label them collectively as “green”.

By acknowledging something to be of a particular hue, we might be less inclined to actually see it than to presume it. The label, since taking on an explanatory function, somehow lures us into an easy relationship with the actual object or material - perhaps easy in the sense of assuming and adopting what is being proffered unquestioningly. We somehow accept that we must already know it since we could put a name to it.

The label identifies and categorises but in the same breath obscures and renders "invisible". And it takes effort to break such a habit of thought - of looking beyond labels; as if seeing anew each time, even at what might be exceedingly familiar. And this is the first immediate experience that comes from Jeremy Sharma’s latest series of paintings.

If It Didn't Have A Name

At first glance, the grid of individually assembled smaller paintings look similar, being completed in limited hues with seemingly very little chromatic variation. There are sets of yellow (or is that cadmium yellow light) paintings and their blue counterparts. Without close scrutiny, one might glance over the panels and conclude that they were probably derived from similar, if not exactly the same, palettes.

It is only when two or more of the paintings are put together in close proximity that one starts to discern their perceptible dissimilarities. Yellow is not simply yellow but comes in very subtle shades and nuanced blendings. The realisation then presents itself in that colours are not mere labels or words, after all. "Yellow" or even "blue" does not do full justice to the actual colours and material present.

And if colours are irreducible to mere words, then what is left is the tenuous certainty of one's senses. The primacy of a direct observation trumps a parred down exposition, surely, in this case. But without proper labels or linguistic markers, how does one even begin to know what is it that we are seeing. Or is it possible to see and think without recourse to words or language itself? Such is the effect of Sharma's paintings that one stops not just to look or merely to ponder; but also to think about the very act of looking.

Marking Differences

Comparing two similar images that are adjacent to each other, one is compelled to scan for observable discrepancies and identifiable similarities, in order to set one surface apart from the next. Perhaps, being so used to pronounced diversity between adjacent images (in the art galleries; in the mass media; in the streets ...), the seemingly monotonous surface treatment evident in Sharma's paintings begins to confound.

How different can one yellow or blue painting be different from another? As one takes time, to stop and to look - as opposed to just glancing - one can begin to notice what was initially missed - the brush strokes loaded with paint and partially dragged out; the repeated dabs that do not entirely align; the scuff marks that place the painted object in actual time and space; the slightly misaligned imprint of a re-stretched edge ...

It is upon a more measured pace of examination that details, which otherwise will just be easily overlooked, become important markers that make substantial the very actual and physical existence of the materials. And more than that, these details highlight the passing of time that these same materials had undergone. One can then start to discern a larger concern in Sharma's approach and thinking about the process of his painting - one that is very much influenced by the passing of time, and the possibilities given in that interval.

The presence of two or more surfaces can only be understood as having been worked on at different times; perhaps, on separate days, at varying stages of completion. There is yet another time interval between the completion of the painting and determining its final position in that particular combination and configuration. The resultant cumulative effect must be one of a heightened recognition of a relationship to the passage of external time - in that the making of one (painting) must rest on the moments that cannot be fully or adequately captured.

Trying Not To

With the unseen passage of time influencing the ensuing actual painting, so must the countless decisions and distractions that flit in and out of the painting process. And the numerous preparations, uncertainties, negotiations and many other intangibles that will finally affect the tangible outcome. A large part of the making process will never be known fully, even if one looks closely. What one sees must in turn be derived in part from what one cannot possibly see.

That leaves one to linger in front of each of Sharma's paintings, and be caught in the transformation of an individual encounter. The more that is seen, the more one realises what was actually not seen before. Minor and unnoticed marks take on a more prominent and sharper focus; colours previously too subtle at first glance become self-evidently distinct; similar parts of the painting seem more different, or disparate parts become more alike each other; careless browsing gives way to curious probing; details seemingly repeat themselves but prove not so.

Such prolong concentration can yield a mildly disconcerting episode: a sense of futility that one has seen it or known it before. The immediacy of looking becomes somewhat speechless - a refusal in case something is missed. It gives rise to a counter-experience which stirs thinking without expectations: just about looking - with a deepen understanding that looking at things entails not looking properly at times, too. And one can only try not to assume too much; or better still, not at all.

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10th September 2011

Lawrence Chin

Summerwell (2010)

Spectrum (2010)

Painted Postcards (2010)

The 'Protection' Paintings (2008)

- Jeremy Sharma's harbour from the vulnerabilities of be-coming

12.2.90

    "Accept that I can plan nothing.

    Any consideration that I make about the 'construction' of a picture is false and if the execution is successful then it is only because I partially destroy it or because it works anyway, because it is not disturbing and looks as though it is not planned.

Accepting this is often intolerable often intolerable and also impossible, because as a thinking planning human being it humiliates me to find that I am powerless to that extent, making me doubt my competence and any constructive ability. The only consolation is that I can tell myself that despite all this I made the pictures even when they take the law into their own hands, do what they like with me although I don't want them to, and simply come into being somehow. Because anyway I am the one who has to decide what they should ultimately look like (the making of pictures consists of a large number of yes and no decisions and a yes decision at the end). Seen like this the whole thing seems quite natural to me though, or better nature-like, living, in compassion with the social sphere as well. “

Gerhard Richter
Entries from the artist's private journal,
Translated and published for the first time on the occasion of an exhibition of his work at the Tate Gallery, London 30 October 1991-12 January 1992, and reproduced in the catalogue, Gerhard Richter, London (Tate Gallery), 1991, pp. 123-4, from which the present text is taken.

An artist is his own worst enemy, and yet his own best friend.

“Man . . . the human person . . . the tree individual . . . the I . . . at once torturer and victim . . . at once hunter and prey . . . man - and man alone - reduced to a thread – in the dilapidating and misery of the world – who searches for himself – starting from nothing . . .”

Francis Ponge (1899 – 1988)
Reflections on the Statuettes, Figures & Paintings of Albero Giacometti
Originally published in Cahiers d'Art, Paris , 1951.

And yet, it is though this tension of enemy/friend, torturer/victim, hunter/prey that the most vital works are being made. Vital, in that they push for a sense of questioning & probing not realized before, in the approach and treatment of the work. And yet, the artist can't ‘consider' too much about the work his about to make. It's as if ‘considering' results in a ‘falsity' that is potentially there already in the making. All works of Art have a foundation of imagining that has its roots in some notion of falseness. The trick is to have an imaginative ‘falseness' and not one borne out of contrived inhibitions.

Yet, in the end, the artist has to ‘decide' what does the deciding involve? How to alter, how to re-define? Or how to destroy? How to re-create. No matter what stance he takes, it will have absolutely nothing to do with how an audience will appreciate it or recreate it with their senses, Somehow, the artist has to master the courage to slip between the unknowing and instinct, to push the creating that excludes an audience, simply because he's own be-coming is far greater & more important than what happens in the “social sphere.”

There-in lies the challenge for an Artist who needs to preserve his own purity for the sake of his own accountability to his Art. There-in lies the vulnerabilities. A power-lessness to change anything in the world, but the power to refuse to compromise to that power-lessness. Yet, vulnerability is so important to how a work is made. For it is in vulnerability and accepting that we ‘can plan nothing', that the work creates herself in a realm of pure unadulterated honest spontaneity.

In the ‘Protection' Paintings, Jeremy Sharma's attempts to push the vulnerabilities to their purest ends are very genuine. In his past works, Sharma had dealt a lot with markings, text and abstract formulations as foundations that led to a larger plane of complex thought-maps weaved into the forms.

It is evident in the new works, that he has tried to combine all the conceptual aspects of his past works into it, and the results are very intriguing indeed. Indeed the whole idea of superscriptions is very apt. It is fascinating to see the layer of image, text and vague referentials collide, contrast, or compliment on top or with one another. In super-scribing, Sharma is also metaphorically creating layers of sub-textual data that seem to come close to saying something and yet stop short. But as a whole, they distort the messages and perhaps that is the point. Its all about the multi-layered metaphors that say something, only if an audience is willing to make that effort to connect to them.

Why Protection? Perhaps the connection it has to vulnerabilities. The painter, in his darkest moments, fritter from one thought to another without knowing what would be the final ‘decision'. He is left to, through his work, expose his own emotional and spiritual wounds, and yet not over-expose them to contriteness. The wounds have to be connected to a deeper realization that they can be healed by the ‘work.'

In this way, the artist's own personal healing is via the work, that he cannot create until he is totally painfully honest about his own turmoil and to convert that turmoil into an aesthetic vulnerability. In this sense, vulnerability is Art leads to a certain protection. A process that involves, as Richter has noted, ‘humiliation' and ‘doubt' about one's ‘competence' and ‘constructive ability'.

This is a process that Sharma has very obviously been willing to do, and that is why his new work, leaves you wondering where the foundations of the work are. Which is the point – Sharma's aesthetic vulnerabilities has this need to transcend above the genres and let instinct take over to create an inner, emotional landscape expanded onto the canvas, free of contrite artistic speculations.

Whether they are the multitude of mysterious-looking faces or the wide canvas of rampant colour & shapes rich in images of hints of notions of ‘safety' or ‘protection', Sharma imbues in them an astonishing array of unknowable shapes and figures that hint, but never define it for us. He treats them in an arresting scourge of colour. Scourge, in that they slash into your mind but never define themselves. They are works that questions not just our consciousness, but the consciousness of what Art is, & can do.

“4 The creation of a work of art cannot be reduced to formulae, nor to some construction of more or less decorative forms, rather it supposes a presence, it is an adventure in which a man commits himself to struggle with the fundamental forces of nature.

To see this through to the bitter end, some of us today risk our necks, we turn our backs on vain quarrels about doctrine, resolutely committing ourselves to those directions which fashion and the public can barely follow.”

Jean-Michael Atlan (1913 – 1960)
‘Abstraction and Adventure in contemporary Art'
First published in Cobra in April 1950.
Reprinted in the catalogue of the exhibition
‘Paris-Paris: Creations en France 1937 – 1957' 1981

It seems that Atlan's manifesto in 1950 seems even more appropriate and important now. Painting defies, in that its struggle is to attempt to overturn complacent ideas about society that technology cannot do, simply in its very human-ness. In that sense, Abstraction in painting is even more important, in that it subverts everything adigitalised, skills-oriented public is accustomed too. The connection between a human hand to a fresh canvas have never been more mysterious than now.

Artists like Jeremy Sharma, especially in the ‘Protection' Paintings, belong to that rare breed of artists, who are not ‘reduced to formulae', who are committed to the ‘struggle with the fundamental forces of nature' and who will ‘risk their necks', “turn their backs on vain quarrels about doctrine, resolutely committing ourselves to those directions which fashion and the public can barely follow.”

The integrity, sincerity, dignity and the unrelenting honesty & purity of the ‘Protection' Paintings speak for themselves. It is only our loss, if we can barely follow.

Kelvin Tan is a musician/writer who's written 2 novels, 4 plays and recorded 35 albums. He is releasing new music this year & beginning work on his 3 rd novel. He can be reached at his website www.dialecticrealm.com

The Massive (2006)

Art is the axe that breaks the frozen sea within us. - Kafka

Jeremy Sharma's paintings for “The Massive” stem from ideas developed during his “ Passing Through The Catastrophe” and subsequently called “End of A Decade” body of paintings done during his Master of Art (Fine Art) Course. Their origins were inspired by a trip to Venice. While looking out into the sea, he wished he could cut it up like a cross-section and present it in a painting. They are paintings of forms, which are a crystallization of figuration and abstraction. This is basically the fundamental, and perhaps most urgent element in this work, which is best isolated and emphasized to create both visual impact and excitement.

These paintings have a lot to do with the idea of sensation. The “body” of the form is painted as the experience of sustaining this sensation (the appleyness of the apple eg.) and not as an object of representation. It is not about recreating a likeness of an object from the real world. Sharma originally referred to them as ‘sea slabs'.

On one level, they are a work of subtraction; Sharma takes away what is not needed. He wants them to be innocent or dark like first objects or last. In some ways, he is trying to create the uncanny. In its subtraction, he opts for neutrality and ambiguity.

On another level to the the discerning viewer, the forms could operate on a level that is between the conscious and the unconscious. They take their cue for example from the sea, itself a metaphor for the deep unknown. Isolating them like ‘sea slabs' suggests a solitary nature, towards a beginning like a cocoon or an end like a coffin or tombstone.

They are like Sharma's whale songs – The Massive.

End of A Decade (2006 to 2007)

The lightness and ease with which Jeremy Sharma deals with the delicate theme of apocalypse and the end of the decade underscores the conceptual maturity and the methodology of the artist. His sweet and endearing apocalyptic vision of the end of humanity must have had its basis in Something foreign and at first invisible to us. Such a situation begs for further research.

Sharma has been researching destruction, at first through drawings during his BA studies (2000-2003) at LASALLE-SIA by using historical paintings and contemporary representations of catastrophes from the daily newspapers, television and Internet. Clear messages, which are sent to the world via narrative photographic images. I believe that the clarity and straightforward narration in this early material did not fully satisfy Sharma's experimental, alchemical nature. The artist continued to seek other ways that would enable him to produce a less obvious, more pictorial visual message. This is where the change begins.

Sharma understands the dynamic and the power of destruction. He creates a painting that is packed with volcanic energy, unforeseen maneuvers and with the velocity of a bullet. In his paintings, explosions happen vertically and horizontally, but also mentally. Like a minefield, but a crime without punishment or victims. An invisible murderer destroying an invisible civilization. It escapes control. The young artist is actively concerned with our future and our impotence to control the imposed chaos.

To present us all of this, Sharma uses classical painting methods, and in a postmodernist package combines impossible historical experience and imagination, facts and dreams, intuition and pragmatic strategy. It is all for one simple reason: to make a PAINTING. And here the viewer can easily lose himself in the intertwining of rhythms, colors and movements; he or she will forget that it is about the darkness of destruction and apocalyptic visions. As if it were about a lightness of disappearing, not the “lightness of being”.

In the end, Sharma believes that the painting, as singular object and as medium, is as important as the message itself, and that is what he makes so clear to us. A truthful, sincere, deep painting of our possible demise.

Milenko Prvacki
Dean, Faculty of Fine Arts
LASALLE-SIA College of the Arts

Selected Support Work & Studies

The Arcane Glimpse (2004)

The Arcane Glimpse - a painting solo exhibition by Jeremy Sharma, 12 - 24 October 2004
- The Substation Gallery

To garner more than a glimpse

A glimpse - the ghost of a look, one of a fleeting, transitory nature? The Arcane Glimpse, a painting exhibition showcasing six mixed-media paintings by Jeremy Sharma at The Substation Gallery, seemed to modestly ask the viewer to take a mere six glimpses at itself. (Or, was it just an innuendo, a playful take on the word glimpse, so as to encourage another inquisitive look? And how about to seduce, tease, captivate?)

Held from 12 to 21 October 2004, The Arcane Glimpse is Sharma's first solo painting exhibition since he graduated from RMIT - LASALLE SIA College of the Arts with a degree in Fine Art (Painting). Sharma's display of six landscape-format paintings were a series of surfaces with paint and other materials that had been smeared, scraped, piled, erased, scratched, stained, printed, dyed, bandaged, stamped on. The finality of it looked every bit like a badly abused and wounded surface of the artist's 'trial and error' approach with his materials on canvases. Amalgamating materials of various differing qualities together on the canvas planes, Sharma made conscious attempts to escape depiction of imagery in a realistic manner, whereby his earlier drawings had relied on marks, imprints and collages to create recognisable and familiar images. Now, resisting a return to those binding desires to simulate identifiable pictorials, he embarked on a painting process that resulted in a restrained, subtle landscape of language stretching beyond the blatancy of images.

In a bid to escape depicting surface narratives in his paintings and to eliminate representational pictorials, Sharma depended on other forms of language to compose his paintings and to denote those processes - narratives of weight, auditory poetry and prose, and journey - in order to communicate his thoughts, his mental and physical voyages and the significances associated with them.

How do you weigh a painting? What device could be used to measure the mass of a painting - a loaded, two-dimensional plane? For Sharma, the impact of visual weight relied upon the baggage of time and the sheer amount and quantity of paint and materials ubiquitously and repeatedly removed and glazed over, even simultaneously. In the traces of the materials accumulated on the canvasses, the measure of heaviness and lightness oscillates between the presence and the absence of paint and other materials amassed onto the canvas. The play of texture and concealment allowed the eyes to take over in gauging and revealing the weight of the image.

In the eponymous painting, The Arcane Glimpse repeatedly bandaged and gauzed black and white surface, conjoined with scar-like splashes and blotches of reds, yellows and blues, achieved an airy lightness, yet heavily weighed down by the tattoo of a title, which sits on a pile, brazenly printed across the bottom right of the surface - a subtitle that refused to float; one that sat grounded, endowing mass to the skin of the painting.

Indeed, using the canvases as metaphorical skins to deposit the weight of traces and marks turned them into target boards for the collection of scars, stitches and past wounds to be disclosed, to reveal history or be buried beneath another veneer of new marks and prints. Where new inscriptions are laid on top of past imprints, the skin offered a sense of history, but a heavy one - one you wished your eyes (or the weighing machine) could probe archeologically to enter the depth behind the surfaces. On the other hand, where marks were erased or removed intentionally, history too was offered, but one of lightness, of erosion, wherein the 'mistakes' were removed and forgotten.

These skins and the processes of time aimed to create a kind of visual and gravitational landing and withdrawal, a constant tension. Repetition of particular marks and traces - losing them at times and then having them reappear at will - hint at an arbitrary, rhythmic sound-wave or cacophony that mimics the mental state of the artist, a reflective psychological mirror of his intimacy with his paintings.

Although executed in a spontaneous manner, the paintings revealed an undeniably controlled symphony rearranged and composed to encompass both continuity and discontinuity of marks and imprints, supplying it, as a result with a quietly overpowering and understated auditory texture, lying at the crossroads of sound and non-sound.

These paintings can also be seen as records of both mental and physical journeys. It is first a documentation of the artist's travel - one which took him to Sri Lanka in mid 2004 - that could also relate to the travel within the mind. Looking at Ode to Twombly, for instance, was like stumbling upon a page taken out from the artist's visual journal, a sketch etched on his mind from his experiences in a small school in Sri Lanka. Displacing the chalkboard from a particular classroom he was especially intrigued with, Sharma also treated his canvases as that same chalkboard, imagining and letting his paint marks and prints be part of the text and images which occupied that particular surface.

His paintings thus act like a jumbled up, emotive mind-map and a depot where mental images and thoughts were parked and placed, so as to be crystallized. It is more than a painting, but a photograph of travel experiences developed to retrieve displaced memories and recollections of a restless, mental voyage.

As a series of paintings that asked humbly only for a glimpse, it is anything but. Sharma's paintings induced the travel of the gaze, where the landscape-configuration of the pictorial drew and withdrew the gaze on a horizon allowing the eye to behave like a camera lens, closing in and zooming out to capture and recapture dissimilar details and information. At the same time, this proximity became a tool for the weight and auditory poetry in the paintings to be unveiled, as well as hidden.

Through the borrowing of mental imageries, the emphasis on the application of materials and the utilisation of prose-like titles to accompany the paintings, Sharma's works implicitly explored the diverse psychological terrain of the gaze. Except for the title of the exhibition poignantly printed on a canvas, all others were not seen on either the gallery walls or the paintings. By imprinting the text of the exhibition title on one of the six paintings, the tattooed text acted as a complement to the painting and to the entire exhibition. It worked together with the pieces in seducing and psychologically teasing the viewers, the artist playfully requesting for a glimpse, a brief look, but knowing full well that what was forbidden, or that you possessed limited time to indulge in the gaze, would rouse the viewers to ask for more.

Reviewed by Hazel Lim. Posted 16th May 2005

1999 (Diploma)
2003 (Bachelor in Fine Art)
LASALLE-SIA College of The Arts, Singapore / RMIT University, Australia