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.