ARTS

Back and Forth Forever

Charles Burwell: Structuring Desire/Desiring Structure


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Published: Dec 8, 2010

Combine scintillating intellectual order with cryptic intensity of desire, mix thoroughly and you've got the recipe for Charles Burwell's art. One of Philadelphia's most recognizable and least imitable painters, Burwell slices and dices his compositions on the computer, allowing him to carve, pierce, integrate and disintegrate layers of patterns. When the viewer attempts to deconstruct the language of the painting, many paths beckon seductively but all ultimately loop back upon themselves into a labyrinth of ends and beginnings.

In a number of paintings in this show, a quatrefoil shape is repeated in a regular grid-based organization. Burwell points out that it looks like a playing card club without the stem, but often it is green like a four-leaf clover. Sometimes, as in Interior Interior(pictured, detail), the pattern jumps out. In paintings like Green and Sticks, the repetition of the four-lobed shape is camouflaged by intervening pattern layers of a different stripe.

Lines define — indeed, they are— Burwell's compositions. Most are straight vertical bands. You don't quite think of them as lines because they begin and end within shapes. Some lines squiggle and meander like roads or rivers on a map. Others arc geometrically like fragments of large letter forms. A third type is straight and organized in X's, like beams in architecture. There are not many outlines, though. On the rare occasions when something is outlined, it acquires extra emphasis. In Green and Sticks, a wide pale line outlined delicately in gray dominates the painting from "behind" broader foregrounded shapes. The crossings inside circular openings look a bit like bandages.

The relationship between Burwell's forms and writing or symbol systems is intentional. Cy Twombly and Mark Tobey, who in different ways translated the mark-making of writing to painting, are acknowledged influences. In Distant Key, a dark, pinstriped vertical rectangle is patterned with a wriggly orange line. This is the "key," Burwell says, like the key to a map, but he also points out that the area may have a relationship to a section of text in an East Asian or Middle Eastern painting.

Burwell has thought about "all over" painting, a 20th-century abstractionist goal that aims at avoiding subject and background, as well as gravitational or landscape references. He rejected this approach, but possibly the fact that as an abstract painter he had to consciously consider it informed the clarity with which he handles spatial elements now.

New White, a 59-inch-square recent work, challenges the "all over" look more emphatically than usual by placing a singular, contained shape in the foreground. Lobed and thickly outlined in dark brown almost like a cartoon, it very vaguely resembles a teddy bear. It is boldly isolated and silhouetted against an expanse of chalky, almost lacy pastels that could be one of his paintings of road-map lines and green clovers. Could this be the beginning of a new direction?

"It's something I'm thinking about, single forms within a larger field," he says. "I like the idea of having the light layers fall back and the two distinct kinds of space between the light and the dark.

"I've been developing an inventory of different kinds of forms over the years," Burwell continues. "I'm always toying with the idea of going from simple to complex or going back and forth, doing simpler paintings and doing more complex, layered paintings. I'm really torn between the two."

(r_rice@citypaper.net)

Charles Burwell: Structuring Desire/Desiring Structure, Through Dec. 17, Bridgette Mayer Gallery, 709 Walnut St., 215-413-8893, bridgettemayergallery.com