Richard Burton: Uphold

 

Imagine that you are in the back of a car, an airport, a doctor’s waiting room. You have been in this space for hours, it seems like days and you begin to wonder what it would be like to be stuck here forever, numbly staring at the rows of chairs and that guy sitting impossibly upright in front of you. Are you feeling claustrophobic? Or is there something oddly comforting about the padded upholstery and eerie artificial glow? These are the kinds of environments that British artist Richard Burton obsessively paints, capturing the ways in which the restless mind can bend even the most banal of imagery into something slippery and strange. Uphold, his first solo exhibition at Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, Berlin presents a captivating new body of work, including a series of small-scale frescoes, that explore feelings of isolation and longing. 

 

While the environments that Burton paints vary, they all belong to the same synthetic world, the regular blocky forms and fluorescent glow recalling the aesthetics of sci-fi films from the 1970s and 80s. And yet, it’s difficult to place these scenes in any particular time – they exist in a never ending dusk, a glitch within the artist’s imagination. This is a world populated mainly by objects or shapes – rows upon rows of wide, rectangular upholstered seats – and where figures do appear their flat, upright postures renders them just another piece of furnishing. In many of the works, the perspective is cropped so tightly as to give an impression of being trapped within a maze of seating while in others we find ourselves in the backseat of a car, gazing out through the windscreen on to an endless road and a wide, empty horizon. Throughout the impression is one of stillness and vacancy. 

 

Each composition is the result of a repetitive drawing process through which Burton distills his forms into what he calls ‘a very thin reality’, referring both to the perspective of his imagery and its superficial familiarity as well as to the application of paint. The large-scale works, for instance, comprise very thin layers of paint that are delicately applied to a canvas that has been treated with primer mixed with a special type of sand that the artist washes and then sieves by hand. The contrast between the roughly textured surface and the smooth, regularity of the painted forms, in turn, creates a cognitive distance: what we see doesn’t quite match up with our tactile experience of the work. 

 

A similar effect is produced by the series of small-scale frescoes, which Burton is showing for the first time in this exhibition. In these delicate works, the pigments are absorbed by the wet plaster so that image and material become indelibly bound while the hardness of the solidified surface creates a juxtaposition with the perceived softness of the rows of upholstered seating. The banality of the imagery is also at odds with the tradition of frescoes that were traditionally used to retell biblical and mythological stories on the walls and ceilings of grand buildings. In this way, Burton complicates our understanding of the image on both a material and conceptual level. 

 

In many ways, this dissonance between subject-matter and materiality produces a sense of longing that chimes with contemporary aspirational culture. More and more it seems we seek validation not through action, but imagery. On one level, this is what Burton’s paintings capture, a state of stagnancy, but at the same time, they also invite us to look beyond the surface, to allow our minds to wander freely and to find fulfillment in our own creativity.