Flin Sharp

Blue
15 – 31 August 2025

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Press release

 



Flin Sharp’s exhibition Blue explores the fragile boundaries between perception, memory, and the mediated landscapes of contemporary imagery. Through layered, illusive gestures, Sharp interrogates how visual information is sensed. His works—featuring fragmented symbols like horses, flowers, and curtains—oscillate between clarity and ambiguity, inviting viewers to engage in the act of deciphering. The paintings’ surfaces, marked by washes and reworked stratified marks, mirror the slipperiness of memory, where details emerge and recede.

Sharp’s process reflects a sincere grappling with representation in an age of image saturation. His work blends pop-culture, art historical references and archived internet imagery, unifying the vibrating nature of pictures today. Blue is a meditation on the tension between concrete images and their elusive meanings. It captures the paradox of painting: a static object that nevertheless feels alive, shifting with each viewer’s gaze.

The exhibition also includes a site specific sound installation in the stairwell of the gallery. Made in collaboration with Welsh artist Cerith Wyn Evans, Field Recording is a five hour long sound collage composed of the artists’ personal collections of musical scores, soundscapes and found internet audio.

Seeing   
by Clare Wigney



It is Christmas Day, and everyone is looking at their phones. My Nan wants to show us a video that she has found on social media. She turns around the small screen, enclosed in a pink, fake leather case, and we watch a video of a cruise ship smashing into a pier- wood splitting, cracking, falling into the ocean and people running from view. She looks back at us, horrified, as my sister tells her that the video is “not real”. “It’s not real,” she says. She swipes down to another video of a French bulldog leaping into a swimming pool. “See, that is real!” My sisters laughs. 

Outside the window some dry, orange leaves skitter across the asphalt on the empty street. They’ve fallen from a large liquid amber tree that stands in the front yard. There is a rope that my dad slung over the fork of the trunk when he was young, which the tree eventually grew around and onto, swallowing the plastic fibres. Inside the brick house, there are some pictures of my cousins and I, many years ago, amongst piles of orange leaves, beneath the tree. 

Between the picture, the memory of the experience lived, and the time in-between, things start to feel abstract. Some weeks later, I sit in my studio and face the task of creating a picture. I am filled with doubt. The way that I see it, anybody who is painting right now, and is dealing with images, is aware that the task now involves reckoning with today’s media landscape. But it feels increasingly difficult to comprehend the madness of it all. Ideas like simulacra, onslaught and saturation feel obvious now, in a media-world where images and reality blur, each informing the other in a feedback loop. 

A painting is not a reflection like a mirror, nor, mechanically speaking, like a photograph. But it no longer claims to be. Somewhere within the task, in creation, especially now, we can locate a unique curiosity and sincerity- that which separates a painting from other forms of fabricated pictures- the Hollywood sign ablaze, propaganda, looters, a cruise ship running aground. It is somewhere in intention and materiality. 

‘Fake’ images no longer appear as such. In a painting you are aware of a process, a hand, something that is being worked out. I am thinking about indecipherable and abstract information. In any way, we are always possessed by the urge to make sense of the visual data before us. Looking at paintings mimics the daily, life-long task of making sense of things and evaluating what we see. 

In R.L. Gregory’s 1966 book ‘Eye and Brain’, the author analyses and explains notable research on the phenomena of sight and perception- biological, psychological and philosophical. He references the Gestalt psychologists- a group of 20th century Psychologists who studied how humans perceive sensory information and organise it into “meaningful wholes”. 

“The Gestalt psychologists point to several important phenomena… in the way that the mosaic of retinal stimulation gives rise to the perception of objects”. 

“This is the essential problem of perception. We can see in ourselves the groping towards organising the sensory data into objects. If the brain were not continually on the look-out for objects, the cartoonist would have a hard time. But, in fact, all he must do is present a few lines to the eye and we see a face, complete with an expression. The few lines are all that is required for the eye- the brain does the rest: seeking objects and finding them whenever possible. Sometimes we see objects which are not there: faces in the fire, or a man in the moon”.

Gregory goes on to describe how our perception of objects is also mediated and altered by the history of the object- it’s past and present to its viewer- when the object transcends experience and becomes an embodiment of memory and expectation. 

When we look at a picture and its contents, we have conscious and subconscious upheavals of memory, things that we have seen before- a personal dictionary of symbols and pictures, imagined, dreamt and lived. When does something become comprehensible? The indecipherable is a force that defies containment.

When I entered Flin Sharp’s studio in Haymarket to see what he was working on for ‘Blue’, a handful of paintings were lined up against the walls. Immediately my eyes and brain did the work to decipher direct, comprehensible images, like symbols- a horse, a donkey, Christmas bells, flowers, a curtain. For the duration that we were together, and talked about painting, and looked at the paintings, gradually more images, fragmented and compromised, revealed themselves to me from within the picture, behind layers of paint. 

You can tell that Flin Sharp is trying to work something out in the process of making a painting. The sum of its parts contributing to the whole- multiplicity, washiness, information suspended within the space of a canvas, seemingly unrelated, often removed, re-painted, or partially concealed, like a secret. In the process of depicting and removing, some information appears as an after-glow, behind what has come after. Caution and curiosity working to understand the point in depicting whereby something becomes clear. Appearing and disappearing images, the layering of information- the act of looking is prolonged, engaged, and exciting.

The paintings offer Images as symbols, detached from a scene or context. These are both overt and ambiguous symbols, as if you cannot have one without the other. They are as much about the function of looking, and the act of depicting, as they are about the imagery and associated connotations. Flin Sharp’s visual vocabulary speaks to the anachronistic nature of media today- images from pop culture alongside those from manuscripts. Within this there is a playfulness and a seriousness- equal parts irony and sincerity. This sincerity is seen in the way that he is working things out- in the soft, washy surface, that implies the thin veil of images, the insecurity of perception. 

These works make me think about memory and its slipperiness. The way that visual signs and pieces of information take form in the act of remembering- partial, fragmented, faded, depleting in the passage of time. Oftentimes it is unclear why a certain thing sticks to the walls of your mind, or what force compels the miracle of one's brain to produce cerebral images of an experience lived, or day-dreamed. 

Remembering can feel like waking up from sleep and blundering around a dark house, grabbing onto indications of reality- the wall, the back of a chair, the windowsill, the threshold. The memory is a living thing- it too, is in transit. But during its moment, all that is remembered joins and lives- the past and present. 

Unlike pure memory, pictures are concrete, unchanging, eternal- and yet their reliability and clarity is similarly compromised- but through multiplication, copying, their circulation through databases, wires, disappearing and reappearing and feeling all the less real each time. Lived experience nullified behind blue light.