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Anthony Burnham's painting is simultaneously a space of expression and of reflection on the medium and pictorial practise. Focussing on the notion of heterogeneity, Burnham has brought together in CLARK's Gallery 1 a collection of recent pictures through which his visits different thematics and stylistic approaches.
As conceived and composed, Burnham's exhibition becomes a crossroads of themes, styles and references. With The Smithsonian Melting 1865, the artist takes up a historical subject, one of the targets of which is the commemoration of history's great events. and uses a realistic treatment. In another painting, in which he exploits the thickness of his materials, and with a title as long as a river (In 1966, a handful of lady racers participated in desert racing, but it was not until 1968 that a large number of lady racers showed up at one event that indicated "the times-they were a changing") his attention is captured by an event tied to the emancipation of the "modern" woman. |
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The abstraction Odyssey and the small pieces taken from the series Collection indéfinIe de palette look back, for their part, on the central concerns of non-figuration, such as the treatment of space and transparency.
Considered separately, Burnham's paintings present well-mastered stylistic vocabularies. But taken in their entirety, the body of work defies, in some way, our desire for cohesion in an artist's production. In making figuration and abstraction, expressionism and realism, gesturality and colour fields live together, Burnham promotes an aesthetic of "the mixed" that disturbs the implicit logic behind the compartmentalization of styles. He confronts us with the capricious leaps of his imagination without giving us a key to their resolution. And, with a little distance, we see in this heterogeneity of sense, content, style and in the permeability of this relationship to the past, a space of resistance to the constant, tyrannical search for novelty and rationality that characterizes the present time.
NdeB.
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| Anthony Burnham completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at Concordia University in 1997. In 2003 he was included in the second Manifestation d'art de Québec (B. Lamarche, curator) and his work was presented at Quartier éphémère (Darling Foundry, Montreal) in 2002. Since 1995, Burnham has worked in duo with Suzanne Déry. Their collective, The Flators, is known for creating and installing inflatable structures in urban contexts. |
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