Ideals of Painting

Arriving at painting having previously produced relational works, Anthony Burnham is still addressing issues of otherness and interdependence. His painting emerges from mutually supportive processes of sculpture, drawing, photography, and installation; it is the deceptively smooth surface of a heterogeneous artistic universe in which the elements and time collide, thus participating in “the same conversation.”¹ 1 - Interview with Oli Sorenson, “Painting Through Other Forms: In Conversation with Anthony Burnham.” M-kos. Accessed May 25, 2012. www.m-kos.net.  If at first glance his painting seems conceptual, it is that it brings into intimate dialogue themodernist Idea of the autonomous painting, the painted embodiment of an artist’s idea, andthe world of ideas evoked by the black and white document. Yet, it is equally concrete, seeing that we — eyes, body, and neurons — are party to this indeed spatial and physical conversation, our perceptions put on alert, rendering every idea subject to material contingencies. Adding to the “layers” of projected objects and produced images is our ever-changing experience, a key element in this inseparable conception of painting. We no longer stand before what we see; we are in it, strangely at ease, as though the painted wall between the world of the image and ourselves had been lifted. In this sense, Burnham’s work is exemplary of an ongoing paradigmatic shift: painting today is resolutely connected, and it is in the vertiginous complexity of its artistic and social connections that sincere ideals resurface, even though they can henceforth only be articulated in relative terms.