Enter Urbano, whose act of preservation simultaneously reinterprets its source material. TABLEAU VIVANT<\/em> is, as its name suggests, a re-creation of a favourite work. Atrium Furnishment<\/em> originally consisted of a half-moon bench in sumptuous green marble, four onyx lamps, and central plant holder, but Urbano has disassembled this work from its tight semi-circle into a radial array of sculptural objects. Some pieces of the bench still function as seats; others resemble the fragments of ruins. Fabricated branches, flowers, and apples strewn amidst the scene evoke the Ramble, a section of Central Park that has long been infamous as a gay cruising ground. Urbano activates a queer potential latent in Burton\u2019s work, a sensibility and orientation toward the public drawn from the social formations in which he was embedded. Removed from its original site and purpose, the decontextualized piece opens to new configurations of intimacy and viewer interaction. <\/p>\n\n\n\n If one ambition of TABLEAU VIVANT<\/em> is to restore the queer context of Burton\u2019s art practice, it does so through blatant artifice. Metal twigs, leaves, and apples flaunt their status as mimics, and the overhead lighting panels abruptly switch from a gauzy orange light to the bright fluorescent glare of a corporate office. One has the sense of a tightly calibrated atmosphere that cannot maintain its appearance. Consider the copy of John Rechy\u2019s City of Night<\/em> that coyly lingers on one of the benches. This best-selling 1963 novel was infamous for its depictions of hustlers and other denizens of the sexual underworld. In the context of this installation, the book alludes to the queer counter-publics that informed Burton\u2019s works. Urbano also seems interested in this novel as a historical artefact: the specific edition on display dates from 1988. Yet strangely, the book feels even more like a prop because of this detail: it solicits, perhaps compels, an imagined reading public, a romance about a time and a place. <\/p>\n\n\n\n TABLEAU VIVANT<\/em> therefore meditates on the very contrivances that seem to ground our access to the past. At once a bid for the preservation of Burton\u2019s artistic legacy, Urbano\u2019s installation curiously underscores the fragility of such efforts\u2014and the ultimate ephemerality of queer interventions in the public sphere. Despite a revival of some cruising sites since the COVID shutdowns, Urbano seems to suggest that even the Ramble will one day disappear\u2014or be unceremoniously uprooted\u2014as Burton\u2019s public artworks have been. Perhaps the most provocative suggestion of this show is that the past, much like Atrium Furnishment <\/em>itself, can never be reconstructed. Instead, we encounter history in and as ruins\u2014in hieroglyphic forms that we grope to decipher.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Based in New York City, Connor Spencer is a PhD candidate in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. In his dissertation he examines the aesthetics and politics of gender-sexual typologies in twentieth- and twenty-first-\u00adcentury literary and visual media.<\/p>\n![\"Alvaro-Urbano\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/113_CR_Spencer_Alvaro-Urbano_156.jpg\")
TABLEAU VIVANT<\/em>, exhibition view, SculptureCenter, New York, 2024.
Photo: Charles Benton, courtesy of the artist & SculptureCenter, New York<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Alvaro-Urbano\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/113_CR_Spencer_Alvaro-Urbano_096.jpg\")
TABLEAU VIVANT<\/em>, exhibition view, SculptureCenter, New York, 2024.
Photo: Charles Benton, courtesy of the artist & SculptureCenter, New York<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Alvaro-Urbano\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/113_CR_Spencer_Alvaro-Urbano_056.jpg\")
TABLEAU VIVANT<\/em>, exhibition view, SculptureCenter, New York, 2024.
Photo: Charles Benton, courtesy of the artist & SculptureCenter, New York<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n