In 1749 Denis Diderot wrote, in his now famous Letter
about the Blind (significantly sub-titled For the Use of the Sighted), that a blind person is able to live in a world without imperfections.
The problem of his blindness and the wish to heal it are, in the main, the problems of the seeing. Diderot, theoretician of a mimesis threatened
by blindness even knew how to compose a love letter while blindfolded. “I write  without
seeing,” he wrote in a letter to Sophie Volland in June 1759, “I continue to talk to you without knowing whether I am forming the letters.
Wherever there is a blank, read there that I love you.”
Naturally words themselves, as something spoken, are invisible. They exist as acoustic phenomena more strongly anchored in time than
in space. They are born of not-being-able-to-see, a circumstance which these pictures for the blind and the sighted take into account in that their ‘titles’
are only readable as Braille symbols and are integrated into the picture themselves as touch-mediated messages. This conceptual gesture leads directly
to the centre of the continually recurring and problematic difference between the sayable and the seeable, between the visible and the invisible, between
experience and memory.
The materials with which Tim Sharp worked tempt one to touch, but only blind visitors to the exhibition are allowed to give way to this
impulse. This unusual handling of the picture surface gives access to raw and smooth wooden plugs, cotton-covered buttons, dangling stones, pigment-filled
glass vials, bent nails, glued on saw dust and over-painted sandpaper. The surface multiplicity can be experienced by some with the finger tips and by
others through the eyes. |
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The almost square pictures are positioned and dimensioned so as to be fully and easily ascertainable by the blind. In time the objects
so ‘read’ will take on a patina commensurate with this tactile use of the art, simultaneously serving as an index for another, a ‘second’ sight.
The idea behind the integration of this ‘other’ sight into painting has more to do with imagination than with perception. There are,
without doubt, correspondences in literature. For example, in Hervè Guibert’s novel Les Aveugles begins with an allegorical description
of a carnival of the blind. The guests at a masked ball wear rustling but colourless costumes and formless masks and capes which are not intended to
represent people, but rather the forces of nature. In the midst of this inconceivable ballroom there is a blackboard on which is written - ‘Costume obligatory’.
Guilbert’s raises the question: who can read this message? And which of the guests can be visibly exposed as having no costume? The emphatic difference
between the imagination of the reader and the sensual experience of the figures in the novel which is indicated here is also to be found as a basic premise
in Sharp’s abstracted painting. Materiality and surface have a different value than where the picture is merely visually readable. The viewer is
called upon to re-think the position from which his imagining and viewing takes place.
At the centre of series is the sense of touch, which, compared to the sense of sight, only correlates in a limited way as a form of
pictorial perception and which is almost a radical questioning of the pictorial itself. Today, more than ever, the tactile links areas of art, science
and technology. In a wider sense it also concerns the relationship of body and picture which, since the nineteenth century in an accelerated form, determines
our experience of media - from the railway and telegraph to the cinema and digital picture media. |
