Sharp's formal evolution is that of abandoning legibility in favor of abstraction. But above all, his painting reflects the overcoming of pure and simple affirmation, and the adoption of a complex language, steeped in Gothic, Hebraic, Greek and/or Egyptian graphic traditions, whose purpose is to narrate the human condition, that of the men and women of Manhattan's Upper East Side whom he has seen live and die.
At the dawn of the 1980s in New York, the roar of a train heralded the birth of a major crew: Kings Arrive Sharp and his homeboy Delta 2 set out to conquer the metal beasts of lines 4 and 6, on which they painted letters of such intensity that others soon set about imitating them on the walls of old Europe. The spectacular photograph by Henry Chalfant published in the catalog of the exhibition devoted to Sharp, "Romance of innocence from hence we came", bears witness to this borrowing: two chromes hanging from the side of a New York subway in 1983, taunt all those who thought they could claim to have "invented" such and such a letter or imagined "graffiti", in a total absence of humility. Twenty years on from this photograph, Sharp has further sharpened the long-standing stroke of the "abstract techno symbolism" of which he is the inventor.
By deliberately turning his back on the intelligibility of lettering, Sharp became aware of what he was painting "on another level" (Ivor L. Miller, Aerosol Kingdom, University Press of Mississippi, 2002). If, for him, graffiti was formed, developed and nurtured outside any external influence (Sharp, Gates of the ghetto, Speerstra gallery, 1993), he used the power of the calligraphic word to transcribe violent emotions born of contemplation of the ghetto, to extract himself from it and find refuge in a radical, totally reinvented elsewhere.
Sharp's formal evolution is that of abandoning legibility in favor of abstraction. But above all, his painting reflects the overcoming of pure and simple affirmation, and the adoption of a complex language, steeped in Gothic, Hebraic, Greek and/or Egyptian graphic traditions, whose purpose is to narrate the human condition, that of the men and women of Manhattan's Upper East Side whom he has seen live and die.
Sharp is a charge against the conventions of the alphabet traditionally taught by the educational system, a move towards futuristic lettering that expresses his anger at the world. After breaking the Rule by painting trains, Sharp pushed the limits of modern language. But with a vision of his own, to quote Ezo's commentary (in Ivor L. Miller, op. cit., p. 45): to transform, like Phase 2 or Futura, his rage to combat the fable that society could be self-improving, would therefore be "tolerable", and above all would remain so if left untouched. In short, to reaffirm the necessity of struggle, just as writers reappropriate the space they borrow and express its aesthetic poverty. And Henry Chalfant reminds us, in his few words that masterfully describe Sharp (Sharp by Henry Chalfant, Sharp, Speerstra gallery, 2005), of the spirit of Futurism.