ArtSeen
Richmond Burton
CHEIM & READ | APRIL 25 - JUNE 30, 2001
Impressive in scale and color, Richmond Burton’s over-the-top group of abstract paintings, I Am, is a series intended to embody “an erotics of artmaking.” But while an aesthetics of sensuality is their by-line, they are more persuasive as spectacular parodies of the passionate self. The problem is not so much in the paintings, but in the expectation that arises from the critical pedestal on which they rest; one begins to discern a disparity between these works, which excel as mark-making, and the aesthetic political tool they apparently stand for. Richmond Burton’s contradictory project walks a tightrope between a modernist rhetoric of radical sexual revolution and a New Age catharsis: one which strips the dualities of resistance and penetration, even as the work has been stripped of the hand. These works are, in effect, the productions of a robotic self.
Richmond Burton, The I Am Paintings, Cheim & Read, New York, April 25 - June 30, 2001. Photo: Courtesy of Cheim & Read.
As visual feasts, each work is filled to the brim with molecular teardrops and boomeranging arabesques that stream into space and surround the occasional and uplifted darkened orb. Confidently tasteless, all is stardust, and Burton waffles the grid knowingly: floating shapes upon a rolling ground. Gestural at first glance, Burton’s familiar vocabulary of disks and dancing decor actually signals a deeper separation of hand from heart and mind from body. They are too noisy, too jittery, too self-consciously prolonged. Their heroic scale heightens this alienation from the heat of touch, and the force and tenderness of sublimated sexuality. They are stylish, and their truer interest in 60s wallpaper and psychedelia is Warholian as it tickles the audience, like Mallarme’s tickling of Harlequin until he dies.
The success of the I Am series is in its perfect alignment with the Society of the Spectacle. The non-hierarchical structures that Burton appropriates from 50s abstractionists trope, the idea of utopia, tilting it toward a clearly disingenuous thought: that the next sexual revolution will dissolve the distinctions between sexual categories. These works instead reflect our societal drive toward sexy consumerism.
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES

Thomas Nozkowski: The Last Paintings
By Tom McGlynnOCT 2021 | ArtSeen
Each of Nozkowski's paintings wind up as amalgams of geometric and biomorphic abstraction of varying scale, color, and pattern that appear to me to be an invented pictographic language analogous to one thing leading to the next.

Singing in Unison:
Artists Need to Create On the Same Scale That Society Has the Capacity to Destroy
JUNE 2022 | Art
Rail Curatorial Projects is proud to present Singing in Unison: Artists Need to Create on the Same Scale that Society Has the Capacity to Destroy, a multi-venue series of exhibitions that aims to foster social unity in light of the recent political climate and the COVID-19 pandemic. The works shown in these exhibitions exemplify the breadth of the creative world, with artists who are taught and self-taught, young and old, and hailing from every corner of the globe. Singing in Unison is a timely endeavor that celebrates the power of art as a public site to stage programming, including poetry readings, music and dance performances, panel discussions on the subject of democracy, and cooking performances by Rirkrit Tiravanija. All of this is done with the aim of enhancing the art of joining in our various communities and to bring people together.
James Brooks: Rendez-vous Paintings 1972–1983
By Robert C. MorganJUL-AUG 2022 | ArtSeen
Although I have encountered the paintings of James Brooks sporadically in various group exhibitions focused on Abstract Expressionism, it has been relatively rare to encounter his works shown together in a context all their own. As such, the collection of works included in the current exhibition from the 1970s and early eighties suggest a somewhat timely occasion, providing the uncommon opportunity to understand Brooks solely through his own work and ideas.
Agnes Martin: The Distillation of Color
By David RhodesJUNE 2021 | ArtSeen
Agnes Martin desired that her paintings, when exhibited, should be presented together in a small group for quiet contemplation. Her long-standing gallerist Arne Glimcher made sure, from her emergence as an artist of significance in the 1970s to this current exhibition, that where possible it would be the case.