by David M. Roth

Tom Burckhardt continues to be one of my favorite painters for the simple reason that he refuses to be hemmed in by any of the last-century orthodoxies that continue to shadow the present. His main achievement has been to respectfully blur the once-important distinctions that separated representation from abstraction.
If you saw his last exhibition in this space (City Slang, 2016) you’ll see a lot in this one that looks familiar: oblique references to landscape rendered in bold colors; real-world referents comically painted; and, most prominently, paint applied in semi-transparent layers that allow occluded vestiges of earlier works to bleed through to the surface – revealing in their thinness, the weft and warp of the underlying fabric. Close inspection also shows, as it did earlier, that the edges of his stretchers are gently incised — an apparent nod to the hoopla that once surrounded the arcane issue of edge treatment back in the day.
Burckhardt injects a few small innovations. He uses bubble wrap to imprint circular shapes the size of a dime, which, at a distance, resemble grimacing emoji but are really just inchoate marks. They cluster around the edges of Ornithology, a painting whose central image more closely resembles a hexagram inside a pagoda than it does a bird. Another small but significant shift has to do with the width of the lines he uses to define enclosed volumes; they recall those used by LA painter John Millei for the same purpose.

Like any worthy explorer, Burckhardt sprinkles breadcrumbs across paths newly trod. In one instance, they lead to a work reminiscent of those seen his last show, which, as it happens, is the centerpiece of this one. It’s titled Call and Response, a landscape topped by a sulfurous “cloud.” Whether the setting is urban or rural is hard to say. There are black “smokestacks,” shaped like cartoon ghosts; polka-dotted “towers” readable as support structures for a bridge; and kidney-shaped “ponds” crisscrossed by pink-and-blue lines that can be taken as crop rows – or something else. I hedge because Burckhardt’s oeuvre is resolutely open-ended. His paintings stand as free-associative tests, revealing as much about the viewer as they do the maker.
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Tom Burckhardt: Psychodiagnostic @ Gregory Lind Gallery through May 18, 2019.
About the author:
David M. Roth is the editor and publisher of Squarecylinder.