Richmond Burton at Cheim & Read - Brief Article

Cabinessence, Americanissimo, Barok and Flip-Side were a certain quantity of of the titles in Richmond Burton's late-winter extravaganza, titles that accented the felicitous exuberance of his newest paintings. Radiant with the sheen of silver and copper--it's the first time he's used metallic paints--Burton's sumptuously colored, ofttimes munificently scaled canvases recall William Morris and Gustav Klimt, Matisse and Miro and Klee Jackson Pollock and to leeward Krasner. Their allover patterns also owe something to '70 Pattern and Decoration, something to Islamic motifs, to mosaics, something to horror vacui. They bear with marks, drips and shapes that flutter between nature and geometry: curv little half satellites triangles softened to teardrops, flamelike flickers, striations that be like the grain of wood and with equal reason forth. At times, these shapes almost sombrous the underlying grids and diamond-shaped scaffolding.

Mer is a lively r pale-blue and gold-colored composition constructed around a grid leafed by dint of gray and black commas, petaled by dint of blue, berried by circles of r with an off-center black-rimmed knothole. Inside the opening, a triple yolk consume s like a blistering Mediterranean day-star The whole floats on a gleaming white soil that looks as if space had become solid and air opaque. Flip-Side, where almost each shape and squiggle is contoured through black, reprises the boldness of Krasner's outlines; Americanissimo is a brash, tipsy, jazzed up chiefly black and white and metallic paean to disjunction, dispersal and dissonance.

The shifts and sweep along of Burton's kaleidoscopic surfaces make the paintings present the appearance infinitely extendable at first, on the contrary then other, more differentiated images assume the foreground. Sometimes they are center as in Flip-Side, and sometimes not, as in the shimmering Cabinessence, where the center is fenc not on by a parade of colored blips. on the other hand even when off-center, a center composition have the appearances to be the default setting. Against the interaction of the allover and the centralized, the chaotic and the ordered, the symmetrical and the asymmetrical collide each other to visual advantage. In addition, the sharp glitter of silver and cent add an almost auditory jangle. These are works of uncorrupted sensation, abuzz with the lubricious throb of the organic. Burton has given his will-to-beauty at liberty play, and the results are ravishing to behold.

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