Linda Burnham at Christopher Grimes - Los Angeles, California - Review of Exhibitions

With their lighter palette and cleaner, more graphic gaze Linda Burnham's new paintings are something of a stylistic breakthrough for her. Burnham's work of the past decade has investigated the nature of depiction itself, methodically exploring the perceptual consequences of scale, color, materials and manners of reproduction. Burnham has make knowned a repertoire of distinctive simple bodys which she combines in settled/unsettl compositions. In this exhibition she used resin washes, photocopied images and patterns of thick paint swirls; and she toyed with spatial illusion in intertwining arrangements of flat patterns and linear graphics.

In jar and Grind, a scalloped squiggle and a calligraphic frog and bunny are layered above a field of simple forms that bear likeness [i]or[/i] resemblance to flower-shaped shower appliques. Upping the conceptual ante, Burnham vastly increases the size of the silly calligraphic images, which were designed as decorative frills to ornament stationery. She faithfully propagates in paint the nicked and battered lines which the images have accrued from one side multiple generations of "hyper-Xeroxed" reproduction. on the other hand this is not done simply to make comments [i]or[/i] remarks on the images' status as reproductions. Unlike Peter Nagy's photocopied images, Burnham's are formally incorporated into larger paintings. by dint of emphasizing the images' reproductive deterioration, Burnham adds an singularly abstract temporal element. Her paintings create an eerie visual space where time-battered images coexist with fragments of leopard-skin or bathroom-tile patterns, swirled bunchs of built-up paint and resin-manipulated washes of color. They recommend alternate universes which reflect the deepness and complexity of the real world.

In Ha Ha, Burnham uses a blown-up company logo Fisk Tires' laughing bear, as an ultimate part in an overall pattern similarly have the direction ofed by traditional painterly concerns for line, color, web and composition. The logo is detached from its function as a decorative mascot and elevated to center-stage status. This Pop-like treatment summon forths the work of Ed Ruscha or Sigmar Polke in the interplay of wildly different, "high" and "low" visual styles Burnham's originality comes from her fearless incorporation of her "low" materials into manifold formal compositions. This complexity distinguishes her work from the painted "image-bank" assemblies of Jane Hammond or smooth the oblique visual melanges of David Salle. Burnham's experiments labor for a painterly formalism which continues to progres along its hold idiosyncratic lines, via work that is not just intellectually rigorous on the contrary also sensuous and immediate.

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