The Brooklyn Rail

Richmond Burton has happily been taking the measure of his own art throughout his career. The Alabama-born artist, who trained first as an architect at Houston’s Rice University, continues to reassess and reconfigure his work for the present moment.

Today, he digs into his vivid abstractions by painting atop his early paintings with vigorous gestures that seem to soften and free up his surfaces, deconstructing his gridded patterning beneath. He conveys a sense of hand-built seduction. He has alluded, at the same time, unabashedly, to the work of his art historical predecessors and to his contemporaries.

We can see in his evolution as a painter the glittering golden patterns of Gustav Klimt, the collage-like and architectural surfaces of Ab-Exer Conrad Marca-Relli, the black-striped geometry of Frank Stella, along with the embedded primary-toned still lifes of Matisse. And we note how comfortably situated his work is in the realm of everyone from Al Held to Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Lee Krasner. It’s in his bones?. He is very much a painter comfortable in his times and places in American-art and landscape. From hard-edged geometric compositions, he turned to a wide variety of rich organic sensual structures.

This welcome show of seven painting, created between 2023 and 2024, titled “The Past is Prologue,” reveals Burton exploring the roots of his career in Abstract Expression, Minimalism, Pop art, and the many genres of abstraction in the 20th and 21st centuries, not to mention impressionism, and, of course, the Egyptian pyramids. By building continuously, extending his reach through historical collaboration and by increasing his playing field, he can have his canvas and revise it at the same time. Built and organic, the paintings are always dynamic, shifting back and forth in time and space.

In these new works we can see how grids relate to organic forms keeping the work in touch with his architectural foundations. He has overtly borrowed from the likes of Monet, for one, in Mirage Triptych (2023), a closely compressed lyrical composition in shades of yellow, blue, green, and pink. A sea of organic flower-like shapes flows across the three canvases. Similarly, there is a vertical rendition in the elegant and structurally sound Mirage. Meanwhile, Eclipse Wavelength (2024) and Matrix (2024) are entirely different stories. In these, Burton has topped convex grid upon grid with a very soft faint red pattern.

It’s like the autobiography of his career, starting with the triangular grid he worked so assiduously on during his early career drafting in I.M. Pei’s architectural firm. He worked on studies for the Louvre’s pyramids, traces of which are evident in the huge painting Matrix. Layer upon layer of finely incised curved geometric lines are topped by a softening broader based red grid describing light in a night sky.

Burton writes in his 2020 novel Rolodex, something that would equate with the ever-expanding space he gives himself by layering his works. “The thing about having a large space is that you feel it. You have an expanded sense of self. It's always with you. The space. And it becomes a part of you. You don't want to ever let it go.”

At the same time, he establishes warmth and emotional depth, as in his soft blue FMRL (2023), hinting, in drapey stripes, at Hunt Slonem’s nature-based neo expressionism harboring almost Slonem-looking birds in an abstract pattern.

The two most divergent paintings in this show I Am Love (2024) and New Earth (2022) appear to break away into more expressive, less grid-underscored realms. The red and white brashness of I Am Love is vivid and seductive and slightly discomforting, while the dark blue with fiery orange, yellow, and black of New Earth marked with a pale limned suggestion of a circular face is explosive and almost audible.

Burton is a unifier, bringing together art and nature, past and present, the cosmos, and even passion. As W.H. Auden wrote, “How should we like it were stars to burn / With a passion to us we could not return?/ If equally affection cannot be / Let the more loving one be me.”