Mobile Perspectives
"Mobile Perspectives" by Daniel Baird, Summer 2010, pp. 70-73 / photo Eric Tschaeppeler
It’s a bright, frigid, mid-winter morning in Old Montreal, with wind that freezes the eyelashes and numbs the lips gusting up the cobblestone streets, and at this hour the Darling Foundry building for once feels like the magnificent abandoned factory it in fact is.
“I just wanted to show you where I made the paintings for this show,” the Montreal artist Anthony Burnham tells me in his slightly bemused, accented English, his cheeks still flushed from the cold, as he ushers me into a spacious, light-filled, utterly empty studio. The only evidence of art comes in the form of spatters of paint on the cement floor and flecks on the peeling walls. “I was here for three years,” he says. “I was one of the first group of residents. I just moved out and the new guy hasn’t moved in—in fact, I haven’t moved into my new studio yet!”
Then he shows me a storage room across the hall, heaped neck-deep with debris, and he hauls out a sad, droopy, rumpled-looking object cobbled together out of canvas and strips of wood. Holding it up, he smiles, as though to say, “Yes, it’s true, this is the sort of thing I make my paintings from.”
Anthony Burnham is 36 and has just opened his first solo exhibition, at Galerie René Blouin. It consists of paintings based on meticulously constructed sculptures that in some cases resemble architectural models and in others look like things rescued from a back-alley Dumpster. After completing his undergraduate degree at Concordia University, Burnham went on to collaborate with the artist Suzanne Dery on portable, relational sculptures that were developed and exhibited during residencies all over Europe. Working under the name The Flators, the pair created inflatable replicas of familiar items that could be placed in their usual environments, thereby complicating them in ironic ways. In what Burnham considers their most successful project, they made a blobby, oversized inflatable the size of a car that they then tried to park on city streets. Like Claes Oldenburg’s giant sculptures from the 1960s, Burnham and Dery’s car is a send-up of the fetishes of our manufactured consumer environment, but it also probes our sense of what an object is in public space: apart from being funny, and potentially annoying, occupying as it does a coveted parking space, the car has a dumpy fragility, pointing toward the contingency and artificiality of the world as we experience it. Nonetheless, by 2003, Burnham had had enough of these ephemeral—but conveniently portable—conceptual projects, and resolved to get back in the studio. At around this time he was speaking with an art-historian friend who was working on a master’s degree on the subject of “style heterogeneity,” artists who resist settling into a single signature style. Burnham found this liberating. “I realized the importance of opening up possibilities, and this gave me licence to explore,” he says. “I felt a disengagement with relational aesthetics,” he adds, “and I had been painting and drawing and taking photographs all along. So I did one last project with Suzanne and then I went back into my own work.
“I had some work in the Québec Triennial, and just before that René had asked me for a studio visit,” Burnham comments as we trudge up from Old Montreal to René Blouin’s 24-year-old gallery on rue Ste-Catherine. The charming, mercurial Blouin is among the most distinguished gallerists in Canada and a respected figure in the Montreal scene. “When he came to my studio, he was very supportive,” says Burnham. “He sent collectors over to my studio and they bought some works. Last November he called me up out of nowhere and said, ‘Anthony, I have an opening in January: do you want a show?’ I made the paintings in less than three months!” Hung on the immaculate white walls of Blouin’s expansive, austere gallery, Burnham’s canvases, with their enigmatic imagery and sensuous surfaces, positively breathe. And when a pair of freshly framed studies arrives, Blouin, who is now 60 yet wiry and energetic, constantly gesticulating and bursting into laughter, holds them up in both hands and exclaims, “They are beautiful: I will sell them by this afternoon!”
It is understandable that the conceptual nuances of relational aesthetics did not in the end appeal to Burnham: he thinks not in terms of abstract ideas but in terms of objects and images. “Instead of taking notes, I construct objects,” he says as we stand in a room entirely devoted to his Mobile Perspective paintings. “It’s a kind of 3-D drawing. I usually build a thing first and then I do drawings of it, take photographs of it—then I paint it.” In Mobile Perspective 1, narrow white rectangular foamcore boxes are arranged on a slightly tilted grey square against a ground of opaque grey-green; wood-coloured slats appear to be balanced on the boxes. In Mobile Perspective 2 a central rectangular box, viewed from above, resembles an architectural model for a space-age mall and is inset into a 90-degree-angle shape that rests within a square of purplish grey. And in Mobile Perspective 3, the perspective is slightly lowered, the background square angled toward the lower right-hand corner of the painting, and the boxes are clustered vertically and horizontally, with one appearing to stand on end like a makeshift wall. In all three paintings, with their shifting, aerial points of view, the shadows are uncannily accurate, though the paintings are bathed in a thin, diffuse, wintery light: they cut and stripe and mirror the objects, their denseness and transparency expertly modulated.
In a way, the Mobile Perspective paintings have a kinship with Russian Constructivist experiments such as El Lissitzky’s Proun paintings from the 1920s, which explored the dynamic, tensile relationships among line, geometric form and the charged, indeterminate container of space. But apart from the fact that Burnham is clearly not aspiring to the modes of transcendence and utopia that underlie El Lissitzky’s formalism, the Mobile Perspective paintings, like the closely related four-part painting Even space does not repeat, are rooted in real objects, set on the surface of the physical world as solidly as Giorgio Morandi’s bottles, and at moments have a titillating, three-dimensional pop that feels like an inside joke. Burnham’s paintings are also crucially connected to the sculptures they are based on. In creating these works, he arranged his constructed objects on the ground, creating a composition before mapping it on the canvas; to get the shadows right he held the objects up to the canvas and traced them. “Everything in the paintings is 1:1 scale,” Burnham points out. “The perspective is isometric. It’s about this desire to represent 3-D in 2-D.”
One might also compare Burnham’s approach to the work of the German photographer Thomas Demand. Demand, who began his career as a sculptor, constructs intricate, hyperrealistic three-dimensional sets, and then photographs them. In Poll (2001), for instance, there is a clean, white, tiered desk on which are set unplugged black telephones, stacks of yellow paper and, oddly, flashlights; in Collection (2001), shiny blank gold phonograph records are mounted on a wood-panelled wall. The illusion of reality in Demand’s work is so intense it often takes a moment to realize that what one is looking at is wholly artificial and indeed strange, and the images themselves are so swept clean of identity they feel abstract. Demand’s constructions are elaborately staged to serve the desired perspective and intended lighting of the resulting photograph. In Burnham’s work, in contrast, the process itself is intrinsic to the work, and the paintings have a subtle, intimate tactility, their minimal, nearly monochromatic grounds imbued with a warm touch. “I’m not interested in making photorealist paintings,” Burnham tells me. “I’m interested in the objects’ presence. That’s something I don’t think you can get with a photograph.”
Burnham may have moved away from relational aesthetics and toward a more materially grounded practice, but that does not mean that his work is without a philosophical frame. “I’m fascinated by the way we get to know objects through images of them,” he says—and sometimes those images have a complicated and ambiguous history. Perhaps that is why he approaches objects from multiple directions simultaneously: through sculpture, drawing, photography and ultimately painting. To date he has only exhibited the paintings, but one senses that his work is the sum of all of these practices. Fragment is a painting of a replica of a ratty-looking cardboard sign Burnham saw in Mexico City. Burnham drew a grid on the back of the sign, numbered it and cut it into 72 equal sections, then photocopied each piece front and back. He then reassembled the photocopies and made a painting of them. The result is Photocopie, a painting of a crumpled, smouldering lead-grey sheet set on a lighter grey ground. And the beautiful Trace is a painting of a low-quality photocopy of a poster, now floating, watery and washed-out; the grid lines that Burnham uses to map his objects onto canvas are visible as streaks. Burnham’s interest in incorporating process into his work is made literal in Plateau (bleu) and Plateau (mobile perspective), for which he made paintings of cafeteria trays and then used them as palettes when painting in his studio, the clumps of blue and grey and white perfectly rendered, the shadows exactly where they should be on the greywhite ground. Like the other paintings in the exhibit, they hover between spontaneity and deliberateness.
There is something obsessively circular about Anthony Burnham’s paintings: they are, after all, paintings of sculptures that are themselves mediated by drawings and photographs; they are paintings about the messy, incomplete process of making things, of objects coming into being. But then there is something obsessively circular about our relationship to reality. We continuously conceive and reconceive ordinary objects until we no longer remember their point of origin, caught in an infinite regress we can ignore but never really stop. Sitting in Burnham’s Mile End apartment later that afternoon, rifling through a crate of old drawings, I am reminded that Burnham’s work, like the artist himself, is also by turns whimsical, gentle and self-deprecating. The drawings range from depictions of goofy objects to traditional landscapes to sketches of zany superheroes that might be part of a graphic novel to studies of the kind René Blouin was so enthusiastic about selling earlier in the day. Burnham is willing to embrace multiple styles and materials, the heterogeneity of art and by implication the world, but there is a sense in which, for now at least, he is committed to painting and its singular ability to command attention and elicit contemplation. “I wish people would slow down,” Burnham tells me somewhat wistfully—we are pressed for time, in a hurry to get to an opening at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal that promises to thrum with the Montreal art world and its chattering classes. “Hopefully the physicality of my work will make people look more. We’re so used to things just fl ashing by—I do it too. The process of making these things was my way of slowing myself down.”
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