Off-Hand Elegance
Charles Burwell: Paintings and Works on Paper
"I always want to create a world," Charles Burwell said in describing his paintings at the opening of his show at the Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts. Biological, botanical and other areas of science as well as archaeological references are folded with seeming off-hand elegance into Burwell's large, colorful but restrained abstractions and a group of black and white digital prints. Repeating looping, lobed lines and the shapes they form in different scales evoke a complexity that moves beyond microcosm and macrocosm to suggest the consequences of conjunctions and differing perception.
Burwell has used automatic drawing as part of his process and for some time has worked with digital images in developing ideas for paintings. He typically employs digitally generated templates in planning the interleaved motifs. "I'm interested in a certain feeling for space that's almost believable but hard to describe."
The series of prints he is showing here and, with a distinctive group of paintings, at a concurrent show, "Continuum," at Bridgette Mayer Gallery (709 Walnut St., first floor, 215-413-8893, www.mayerartconsultants.com) reflects his long-term familiarity with digital media. Hints of playfulness leaven Burwell's minutely ordered compositions.
A critique of science and its certainties is suggested by Burwell's juxtaposition of precisely painted vertical stripes and horizontal bands of gravity-driven drips. The organic accidental quality of the drips relates to the hard-edge stripes in a way that might parallel the quantification or diagramming of irregularity. Or perhaps the deconstruction of seeming precision into underlying chaos.
On the other hand, are such thoughts examples of pareidolia, the mistaken perception of patterns or meanings where they don't really exist? Burwell's suggestions of randomness are calculated. Although there may have been automatic writing somewhere in its inception, each piece is the result of an extended series of bouts of work, often separated by long intervals. "I'm not sure any of these are really done," he remarked, referring specifically to the work in the DCCA gallery. "I could add to them. I may add something; I may not. Usually a painting is finished when I don't have it around anymore."
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