Denzil Hurley & Brian Sharp at Sebastian Gladstone
A conversation around conservative impulses in art is timely today, as confusion abounds. At the level of the overall artistic ecosystem, it is commonplace to assume that beautiful painting is inherently more conservative than, say, intellectually motivated installation. There is no reason for this to be the case aesthetically, although it may be true in the marketplace. In our time, in the wake of Contemporary Art's annihilation of the categories of valuation, such categories as medium and form are inadequate for expressing the actual aesthetic quality of objects. In other words, there are no hierarchies of genre adequate to articulating the Geistic realities underlying today's experience of art. Value judgements, especially those concerning the inherent radicalism or conservatism of a work, must be made today on a more granular level, with special attention to the needs of individual works. The generic value criteria of linear historical trajectories no longer suffice to capture an accurate assessment of a work’s quality.
At the level of the individual artist, conservatism manifests as discipline — an admirable trait for today's practitioner. Schiller wrote already two hundred years ago of the "play-drive" and the "form-drive". The latter is the conservative impulse. It is motivated by control, fidelity to an imago, by tradition and by restraint. Without it, art is liquidated into infantile aimlessness, which characterizes so much of the art that is advertised to us as "radical". Taken without the play-drive, however, art becomes a corpse.
Installation view, Denzil Hurley & Brian Sharp. Sebastian Gladstone.
Denzil Hurley and Brian Sharp's two person exhibition curated by Jonas Wood at Sebastian Gladstone brings these concerns to the surface. Hurley, the late mentor of Sharp and Wood, produces quiet, controlled paintings. In each, panels painted subtly different shades of black are joined together by broomsticks sourced from his native Barbados. We are told this broomstick joins the compositions to the artist's identity, which is a common requirement of the Contemporary Art paradigm. The paintings often become a mirror of the human form, mocking the big-headedness of Contemporary Art. The stick attachments generally appear to satisfy two impulses, one intrinsic, and the other social. The intrinsic impulse derives from the compositional needs of the works. In Glyph 4 the inclusion of the lower trunk grounds the work and renders the painted panels all the more imposing. In others, its presence is less compositionally compelling and seems to satisfy only the social impulse — the need for a sense of artistic originality (no one else that I can think of adds sticks like this to their panels), and again to tether the compositions to an experience of identity (I do not believe the resemblance to protest signs is incidental).
More compelling is the arrangements of shapes and the vibratory difference of color between the panels. In Glyph Within, Without, and About #4, a single orange panel (the only in the show) erupts from one quadrant of the painting. This work is grounded by a hulking "stick attachment" which feels more like a shaved tree trunk. Together with the larger scale of the work, these two elements achieve a certain palpable physical power which explains its central placement in the exhibition. Elsewhere the shapes of the panels produce a sense of potential motion, as in Turning Glyph #1 and the ascendant ZB3, Stacked Glyph. The further one surrenders to the compositional dynamics in each work, the more archetypal or elemental they seem to become. They are classically modernist in this sense, distilling form into an essential image, a snapshot of a prototypical aesthetic idea. This seems resonant with the glyph theme in their titling. Juxtapositional interventions — in this case Hurley’s sticks — resolve into a formal irreducibility.
Denzil Hurley, Glyph Within, Without and About #4, 2016–2018. Oil on linen with stick attachment, 108 x 62 ½ in. Sebastian Gladstone.
In Sharp's works a similar disciplined and contemplative quietude is achieved through intense exploration of simple compositional formulae. Sharp seems to engage head-on the quip of abstract painting as wall decoration by rendering wallpaper at the level of the sublime. Each work has a robust tactility which underscores the laborious and focused conditions of their execution. Apart from Untitled (Blue / Grey E.V.), all of Sharp's paintings here are defined by straightforward propositions: Untitled (Red / Red Stripe, Blue Lines), Untitled (Yellow / White Stripe), and even the charming Untitled (Green Vine / White) seem to be titled as instructions for execution — and the paintings themselves are disciplined products of those instructions. Yet they do not die there. In the details the colors pulse, the brushstrokes press against each other, the exactitude of the execution is here upheld, there sacrificed. In the details they are fraught with physicality and objecthood. Where Hurley finds aesthetic power in pursuit of formal tightness, Sharp finds it where formal tightness gives way to accident.
Ultimately, both need both. In the works of these artists, freedom and originality is discovered within disciplined systems of production, not by abandoning that impulse altogether. One can anticipate charges of the works being dead, boring or conservative, but careful attention to their physicality and aesthetic precision renders any such accusations superficial.
Brian Sharp, Untitled (green vine / white), 2025. Oil on linen, 68 x 52.5 in. Sebastian Gladstone.