In the opening

Chris Sharp Gallery is pleased to inaugurate its new space with a solo exhibition of the Oakland-based duo, CrossLypka, entitled, In the opening.

Life partners who have been collaborating together for almost a decade, Tyler Cross and Kyle Lypka make ceramic sculptures which are both freestanding and exist on the wall. The stark, if severe simplicity of what they create elegantly yields a multiplicity of allusions and significations. Loamy and alluvial, the work extends the sensuous line of the body over the rugged, coastal landscape of Northern California, as if the grainy complexion of the sculptures was buffeted smooth by the surf and wind. The formal silhouettes of the work, which are known to double or butterfly, teem with lexical, typographical, or heraldic evocations, bringing to mind an alien semiotics whose key has either been lost or has yet to be found. 

What they make is not foreign to Donald Judd’s notion of the “specific object.” Neither “painting nor sculpture,” but closely related to both, these objects are as pictorially entrancing as they are spatially compelling, to say nothing of the myriad subtleties that dwell on, within, and around them. Yet their so-called specific objecthood is complicated by the graphic nature of the fluid, if imperfect curvilinear contours which shape them– that which ultimately speaks to a starting point grounded in drawing. The glazes that both adorn and are indivisible from their surfaces are anything but excessive, but rather seem to have been reduced to their essence. Here color functions not so much as an embellishment but more as a trace or wash. For all its allusiveness, however, there is nothing coy about this work; its intentionality is as lucid as the occasionally cracked and transparent veneer of glass caked on and wedded to its forms.