Studio Visit 

{..} Each and any real image lies in the role that is more tantalisingly fact than illusion, starting with a number of decisions made ‘as I go along’, Hall utilises an open-ended pull of precarity. A matter of finding where things might seem to surprise or confuse, in each imbedded, complete painting seems to render the familiar unfamiliar, or the other way round. While Hall’s apparently contrary notions might suggest a campaign of extensive wrong-footing, this is not the point. Pink and yellow, so deep but filling the space, start to represent a state where colour is nothing other than what it is. Suggestive of a place that exists in much earlier painting, the work creates a strong sense of actual existence. Odd things do happen, and things are able to remain still, in a fixed state, perhaps.

Sacha Craddock
April 2024

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Charged Presence

[...] There are paintings in which muted, opaque colours butt against each other, their relationship sharpened by contrasting wedges of luminous paleness; and there are others in which the light emanates from beneath the paint and through layers of glazed colour to create indeterminate spaces. In both cases the atmospheric quality of the colour offers a contrast and counterpoint to the incisive divisions of the canvas and the surface-emphasising way in which the paint is brushed. Tensile surfaces and translucent depths are brought into play, with edge-defining bands of stronger colour giving definition when needed. Hard-edged areas are infused with atmospheric colour to produce an overall effect of painterly orchestration. These recent paintings are the works of someone so experienced in her medium – so in control of her resources -  that she can use it to create works which are not only compelling in themselves but which, when they are shown, can magnetise the spaces around them.

Stuart Bradshaw
April 2024

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Abstract painting with a geometric conception, this is how we could define Sharon Hall's artistic practice. But this label fails to fully convey the final results achieved by this English painter. In fact, her paintings have a special freshness. If the starting intention seems to be to build works in which the division of spaces is regulated in a very exact and rational way, the final outcome is surprising because it possesses a fascinating visual softness, evident when looking at her works not on the screen of a computer, but live, when it is possible to savor the velvety concreteness of the colours. The colours, in fact, which in each canvas are combined with great accuracy: they occupy contiguous monochrome sectors and interact with each other intensely. This conversation of colors takes place in every single work of Sharon Hall, it is a dynamic that represents the soul of her paintings. Warm shades - red, green, orange, yellow - spread over the canvases, creating a comforting effect, releasing their quiet intensity. These works contain a very stimulating contrast. An exact grid is always present, a rigorous division of space, but this rigidity of the forms is modified by the colors that inhabit these boundaries, created and combined with masterly sensitivity.

Pittura astratta di concezione geometrica, potremmo definire così la pratica artistica di Sharon Hall. Ma questa etichetta non riesce a rendere pienamente i risultati finali a cui arriva questa pittrice inglese. I suoi quadri infatti sono dotati di una freschezza speciale. Se l'intenzione di partenza sembra quella di costruire opere in cui la divisione degli spazi è regolata in modo molto esatto e razionale, l'esito finale sorprende perché possiede una affascinante morbidezza visiva, evidente quando si guardano le sue opere non sullo schermo di un computer, ma dal vivo, quando è possibile assaporare la concretezza vellutata dei colori. 

I colori, appunto, che in ogni tela sono accostati con grande accuratezza: occupano settori monocromi contigui e dialogano fra loro intensamente. Questa conversazione dei colori si svolge in ogni singola opera di Sharon Hall, è una dinamica che rappresenta l'anima dei suoi dipinti. Tonalità calde- rosso, verde, arancione, giallo- si distendono sopra le tele costruendo un effetto confortante, sprigionano una loro quieta intensità. Queste opere contengono un contrasto molto stimolate. E' sempre presente una griglia esatta, una suddivisione dello spazio rigorosa, ma questa rigidità delle forme viene modificata dai colori che abitano questi confini, creati ed accostati con magistrale sensibilità.

Galleria Stanza 251
2023

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I am interested in the instability of colour and the viewers participatory involvement in reading a painting – its atmosphere or sense of space that sometimes suggests a shallow illusionism-influenced in part by my encounters with the many trompe l’oeil devices employed it Italian wall painting from Roman times through to the quattrocento.

 I use colour intuitively, getting a sense or feel for how a painting might develop so in this way each work is essentially open ended- they are not planned or filled in but arrived at through the internal dialogue with their making developing a conversation with each part within the painting- how colours relate and sit next to each other, the spaces or they might suggest sometimes literally physical spaces  with semi raised shelves or bands of accent colours: highlighted edges etc

in 1977 I saw the first major show of Agnes Martin in the UK, at the Hayward Gallery. Together with a developing interest in the optical theories of George Seurat these two probably quite assonant strands helped me to develop the abstract paintings which I made as an undergraduate and subsequently post grad student at the Slade School in London. From this point onwards and during the eighties and 90s my work moved between all over colour fields which used inserted political imagery to what became eventually purely abstract paintings using’s firstly loose gestural drawing and then eventually more architectural structures derived from the grid. The grid still functions in part in my current work, but I am not tyrannised by it, and I often move deliberately to subvert and surprise the viewing ‘logic’. I feel I have developed three simultaneous themes or approaches to the construction of my painting’s and I am quite happy to let these different strands co-exist. The only real constant I can say is definitive is the overriding interest in the interaction of colour and what happens when they are placed in closeness to each other- confirmed by my early exposure to the Albers book when I was still an undergraduate and very recently in a conversation, I was lucky enough to share with Bridget Riley in Rome at the opening of her ceiling painting at the British School there.

 The experience of colour as narrative has been a thread that runs through my work and important colourists artists such as Joseph Albers, Bridget Riley, Sol Lewitt, Anne Truitt, Brice Marden, Kenneth Noland, Dorothea Rockburne, Gene Davis and Ellsworth Kelly continue to be major influence in my thinking and painting practise. 

Most recently I have been using a deliberately, shallow formal space with elements sitting in front of or behind each other. The overall unity within the pictorial architectonic is very important to me but I do not want the paintings to sit too comfortably and often they employ a kind of twisted to constantly shifting perceptual space to make them more active and deliberately awkward.
Very recently I have begun experimenting with lopsided and shaped canvas supports.

Sharon Hall
2023

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Each colour section has its own character and communicates with its adjacent neighbours, developing an innermost dialogue. These perceptions are enhanced through Hall’s use of bright and vibrant colours. Instinctively hard-edged painters like Frank Stella, Ellsworth Kelly and Joseph Albers with their monochromatic fields of clean-edged colour, come to mind, emphasising the flatness of the canvas surface. In contrast, Hall plays with different textures when composing her colour segments, offering a distinctive twist. Her geometric elements can be found in human designed environments, such as medieval and modern buildings as well as interiors. It is evident that these symmetrical and ordered components can be translated into architectural plans or layouts. In Hall’s case they can be interpreted as close intersections, elevations and passages. From time to time, she separates diagonal and rectangle colour wedges with wide and narrow stripes, or else, blocks of encroaching colours are introduced; with each method she crafts unique vantage points. The beauty of Hall's paintings is delivered through the filter of her creative spirit and her well trained eye.

Renée Pfister
2022

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The installation combines a number of Hall’s abstract paintings with a recent series of ‘leporello’ book works, which extend her explorations of colour, light and space, across folded paper pages and into three dimensions.
Hall’s work is distinguished by its subtle manipulations of layered transparencies of paint on supports of gesso panel and linen canvas: ‘Held by geometrical armatures, intense colour bands divide surfaces into sections.Their pulsating planes evoke minute, barely perceptible rhythms that nuance the firm and measurable time invoked by the pictorial architectonic.’ (Kamini Vellodi, ‘Painting and Time,’ Playtime catalogue,Arthouse1,2019)
Whilst working within parameters of a contemporary, formalist language of abstraction, her paintings carry an emotional resonance that refers back to traditions of the quattrocento, revealing how light affects the nuances and poetic qualities of colour.
In 2016 Hall began making folded paper structures that allowed her to experiment with light and shadow, creating optical illusions in relation to the surface of the two dimensional images and the three dimensional space they imply. Using acrylic, watercolour glazes and washes soaked into paper, she threads and weaves enormously sophisticated colour relationships across the zig zag structures.

Emma Hill
2021

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[ ] sections appear as forms, kinetically relating to one another on the same plane. They participate in a space that seems to me to conform to Clement Greenberg’s notion of picture making. ‘Pictorial space joins and contains, and by containing makes everything it shows discontain itself and surrender itself to a unity, which in turn contains itself.’ The dynamism of the angles connecting the verticals creates a tension that is potentially disrupting.[ ]  By using diagonals the shape of the wedges influences or adjusts to the shape of the adjacent areas. The forms are thus ‘discontained’ to surrender themselves to a unity bounded by the finite area of the picture’s dimensions.

David Sweet 2019

 

David Sweet
2020

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Paintings by Sharon Hall employ a [ ] structure of diagonals that converge without suggesting perspective depth. In Contrapunto (DS) (2018) they radiate from the geometric centre of the rectangle. In Accentata (Blu) (2019) they join the top to the bottom progressing laterally across the painting. The diagonals in In Four (Green, Pink, Ochre, Cadmium) (2019) and In Four (Blue, Yellow, Green, Terra Verde) (2019) connect the left and right sides of painting, marking out four tapering sections each given a different chromatic value. These sections appear as forms, kinetically relating to one another on the same plane. They participate in a space that seems to me to conform to Greenberg’s notion of picture making. ‘Pictorial space joins and contains, and by containing makes everything it shows discontain itself and surrender itself to a unity, which in turn contains itself’ (Greenberg 2003). The dynamism of the angles connecting the verticals creates a tension that is potentially disrupting. If the diagonals had been horizontals each section would be independent or ‘contained’. By using diagonals, the shape of the wedges influences or adjusts to the shape of the adjacent areas. The forms are thus ‘discontained’ to surrender themselves to a unity bounded by the finite area of the picture’s dimensions.

David Sweet
2020

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[...] it is inorganic regularity that seems to characterise Sharon Hall’s paintings. Held by geometrical armatures, intense colour bands divide surfaces into sections. Their pulsating planes evoke minute, barely perceptible rhythms that nuance the firm and measurable time invoked by the pictorial architectonic.

Kamini Vellodi extract from essay Painting and Time in Playtime catalogue Arthouse1 London 2019

Kamini Vellodi
2019

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 The painterly language that informs Sharon Hall’s works is rooted in the experience and knowledge of how light works in painting.  Hall went to paint in Italy in 1990 when she was awarded a Rome Scholarship and it is possible that both her intense feeling for place and the colour language of her mature style come, at least partly, from her experience of Italy and Italian painting.   It is not so much the 'correct' chiaroscuro of the high Renaissance that interests her as the poetic-symbolic colour of the masters of the quattrocento, such as Fra Filippo Lippi, and also of the Mannerist, Jacopo Pontormo, that guides her in her quest for that ineffable sense of place that painting can evoke.

The geometrical scaffolding of the paintings is precisely as complex as it needs to be for the colour to do its work. In his essay 'On Colour' from The Salon of 1846 the poet Charles Baudelaire writes: “As the sunlight changes, tones change in value but, always respecting their sympathies and natural antipathies, continue to live in harmony through reciprocal connections.” These words could serve to describe Hall's colour modulations.  Tone-colour values are deployed in asymmetrical groups: dark, very dark, light, and very light, together with multiple nuances of warm and cool, strong and weak, that form a contrapuntal relationship with the symmetrical geometry. The geometry is the framework that enables this exchange system to function effectively. 

The photograph on the front cover of the catalogue for Hall's solo exhibition entitled Colour in Place in the Palazzo del Podestà, Pescia, Italy in 2013 shows two very small paintings on an empty expanse of wall. Scale is given by the inclusion of a stack of larger paintings face to the wall.  It is due to their extreme clarity and economy that these small paintings have a presence out of proportion to their size.  To make a very small painting seem large is always felt as a triumph by a painter.  Not only is this colour in space – it creates a space. 

 

David Saunders
2019

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Cet ensemble de peintures et de gouaches, représenté ici dans les photographies, étudie les différentes manières dont les propriétés de la couleur et les structures géométriques simples peuvent travailler ensembles. Il résulte de leur interaction une résonance optique et un décalage de spatialité qui transcendent leur apparence simple. Cette série explore la matérialité physique ainsi que les plus insaisissables qualités de lumière et de translucidité. Elle reflète mon rapport à la place non seulement à travers la manière dont peuvent opérer la lumière et l'ombre dans un cadre architectural mais aussi dans ce qu'elle de mon intérêt pour la couleur ancrée et certaines traditions italiennes de fresques et de peintures murales.

Sharon Hall, translation Vincent Patillet
2016

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Catalogue Essay, Eye and Mind, The Mercus Barn, Mercus-Garrabet, Midi Pyrenees, France 2015

Sharon Hall’s paintings find complexity through colour rather than form, which is to say that a deliberately transparent permutation of geometric form becomes a context for the subtle shifts in colour relationships, that can be further explored as the paintings comprise more than one interchangeable panel. The resolved state of a complete painting is in Hall’s words “found”, through trial and error—the initial structure an adequate, or neutral armature, on which to place colour. Optically, there are also shifts of space that reflect the positive-negative aspects of the structure where there is also a tonal contrast. Take, In Part Sequence (Orange, Yellow, Terra Verde) 2014, in which this constant realignment of the segments of colour is a product of the duration of viewing. The rational construction of repeated triangles connected with a partial and implied grid is counterpoint to the structuring influence of the reduced chromatic range of orange, yellow and green. In, In Part Stacked Painting (Green, Orange, Yellow, White,) 2014, surface incidents from making—the action of a brush as well as characteristics such as absorbency—are all incorporated rather than illuminated. The two part painting, an overall vertical, the upper part of which is horizontal, reflects a duality in its repeated doubling—of two panels, and two pairs of triangles and displays a motion not unlike serial or fugue patterns in musical composition. In Hall’s paintings system and unitary repetition are willingly undermined rhythmically and not relied upon to provide cohesion—they represent a necessary premise that is then exposed to reconfigurations vis-à-vis colour.


 

David Rhodes
2015

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The painting’s structure is based on rational divisions of its surface area, first into two, around the perpendicular centre line, with the resultant pair of rectangles subdivided by diagonals drawn from the top corners to the mid-point of the bottom edge. These simple moves establish what emerges as a gestalt, namely an inverted pyramid, balanced on its apex. But the work is not symmetrical. The right hand triangle is further divided into three more areas that are not answered on the left. These three shapes are perceived slightly differently to those within the pyramid. They seem to move in a one-sided clock-wise movement, adding a dynamic in terms of geometry, which is taken up by the colour, swinging through the spectrum from orange to yellows, deep then pale. The closeness in hue of the orange allows it to hang off the edge of the cadmium red, but the red, which is the key architectural element in the painting, is strong enough to support it. 

The surface is consistent throughout, while the density of the pigment confirms that the colour is ‘built’ out of the traditional material of painting, selected from the traditional palette rather than from the refraction of white light arranged around a colour wheel. The geometry is also practical rather than aspiring to the art of pure relationships. Left of centre the ambient chromatic temperature changes. The blue, ochre and umber represent the earth colours ranged against the more luxurious cadmiums, dividing the light in the painting virtually into two seasons. This gives rise to the significant visual experience offered by the painting, created by the contrast between the conditions across the recto/verso axis. It is as though the eye is taking a journey from north to south through several latitudes, sweeping left to right, from grey-blue to pale yellow, before returning to the chromatic and formal hospitality provided by the red triangle.

 

 

 

 

David Sweet
2014

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                    In a group of recent paintings, some of which are quite small and circular in shape, hard-edged beams, or wedges, of colour radiate outwards, sometimes from the centre and sometimes from a corner of the canvas. In several of these works the relationship between colour and light could be seen to be almost graphically represented by the format. These paintings further suggest a temporary stasis in a process of double movement which proceeds both outwards from a point and also moves in a circular fashion around that point, thus emphasising the rhythmic relationships between colours. These relationships heighten the contrasts between colour and light, or tone. Rather than establishing a sense of consistent intervals between individual colours, the paintings generally follow a pattern of grouping two or three closely related, often pale, colours together and then juxtaposing them with a sharply contrasting beam of a very different colour. For instance, a sequence of three successive shades of cream may be followed by a deep crimson. This suggests gradations of light falling unevenly across a wall and then being interrupted by a differently coloured object.

Stuart Bradshaw
2013

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This approach to colour rhythm has been carried over to the current, larger, paintings in a more subtle way. Colours are still grouped into units of two or three, but their arrangement into vertical bands or vertically-orientated shapes, as opposed to tapered beams, not only gives a greater autonomy to individual colours but also creates more of a sense of relative visual space within and between different groups. In addition, the verticality of these paintings appears to relate to an experienced verticality as opposed to the act of simply dividing the surface of the canvas into vertical shapes. It comes from the bodily experience of gravity and as a result the colours now seem to be charged with a weight or density which they previously didn’t have, even as they radiate light.

                    So, although these paintings are abstract in appearance, they relate to two fundamental facts of human experience: light and gravity. These are not represented but are embodied in visual form through the medium of paint, which gives the paintings their own reality as coloured surfaces within the spaces in which they are displayed. Perhaps an awareness of this relationship between  paintings and  space develops into a general receptivity to the qualities of interior spaces. Certainly, Sharon Hall has become fascinated by the fusions of light and space, and the subsequent atmospheres – warm, limpid and redolent of both earth and air – in many old Tuscan buildings. I’m reminded here of a quote from Paul Valery which appears in Roland Barthes’ essay about Cy Twombly, ‘The Wisdom Of Art’. “These vast rooms of the Midi, very good for meditation, with their tall furniture looking lost. A great void locked in – where time doesn’t count. The mind wants to populate all this.”

Stuart Bradshaw
2013

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