3 minute read
Jeremy Sharma: Painting by Numbers
By Sherman Sam
Cast a quick glance across the oeuvre of Jeremy Sharma and you could describe his work as becoming increasingly technological. A decade ago, he was known for making a variety of monochromatic paintings. Since then, he has swapped painting for installation, video, sound and now he has added digital prints and carbon paper drawings to the mix.
What is consistent here? Materiality, technology and data. Keep in mind that wall or panel painting is just a very old form of technology. I’m suggesting that far from leaping from painting to installations with sound and lightboxes, Sharma is really interested in the production of form, it is just that he uses technology and data as the vehicle to generate it.
Sharma’s latest works, digital prints and carbon paper transfers, draws from a different kind of information: images. For the prints, Sharma sourced the internet for pictures, then used a program to turn them into outlines which he then deleted or filled with colour creating shapes. He started with one image before combining it with a second, then maybe a third. Hence Sharma’s process is both to subtract and add, in that sense it is like collage. pshkr, (all works 2020 unless otherwise noted), for example, is a tall yellow field in which fragments of white, black, blue, green and red shapes float on a yellow ground. The result feels like a redacted image or a bizzaro yellow, drunk, cubist-design wrapping paper. It is the most non-representational and allover patterned of the prints. The others are landscape format, and the rectilinear outlines in Ragtime Kowloon Jam (After Mondrian), for example, suggest cityscapes, while his source material is most clear in The Boat and crasshh (after Richard Prince) as that of boat and car. The distinct outlines of the latter pair bring to mind a giant colourby-numbers. However, Sharma’s results are neither image nor abstraction, picture or object. Like redacted information the prints are somewhat liminal entities - you know some things but not the whole.
Jeremy Sharma Ragtime Kowloon Jam (after Mondrian), 2020 digital print on archival paper 150 x 194 cm Photo credit: Ng Wu Gang
Jeremy Sharma rylGrnsmlM (after Mark Bradford), 2020 digital print on archival paper 150 x 194 cm Photo credit: Ng Wu Gang
Jeremy Sharma The tree, 2020 digital print on archival paper 59.5 x 42.6 cm Photo credit: Ng Wu Gang
If the prints have an occluded quality, then the carbon paper transfers do the reverse. They show everything. One has a sense of the source material, but like the prints what we see is determined by Sharma’s touch. For instance, in Selarang, the picture is of a loaded lorry in a field, broad pencil marks fill in the space whereas in W, 2013, the sky and ocean are dense and filled. The former feels like a sketch and hence quick, while the latter precise like a photograph. The images were taken by an Australia POW George Aspinall in Japanese occupied Singapore. Sharma says “something about the photographs of that time captured my imagination and about how someone was secretly taking photographs, the captured foreigner capturing Asia.” These drawings are Sharma’s most haptic work for some years.
We generally think of data as facts, statistics, or analytics, and hence “meaningful”. In general data has to do with markets, populations and informatics to predict outcomes, but imagine if information served as the subject of art production. Then, Sharma offers a highly idiosyncratic path, as any pioneering endeavour should do. He has described his work as conceptual, and that is correct. However, the concept is not located in the object, rather it determines the nature of his approach. Sharma has said that “really good art is about artists changing the way you think about art.” But the reverse is also true: good art is about artists changing the way we look at the world. We may never “see” data the same way again.
Exhibition: June 3 - July 3, 2021
Jeremy Sharma Tram view, 2020 carbon paper 23 x 31 cm Photo credit: Ng Wu Gang
