With its formidable realism, Anthony Burnham’s painting made him a must-see. Since the first Quebec Triennale (2008), an ephemeral event of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Montreal, the graduate of Concordia University, in 1997, appeared and reappeared here and there, notably defended for ten years by one of the most popular galleries . And then, almost nothing. Puppet exhibition in 3 actsat the new Eli Kerr gallery, marks the great return of the man who has just crossed the threshold of fifty.
“Oh yes, was I absent? I didn’t even know it, said the main person concerned with gentle irony. But it’s true, it’s been seven years since there was a new proposal. »
It must be said that, since his last solo in 2017, there has been a pandemic. Already, from 2019, Anthony Burnham benefited from a full-time teaching position as artist in residence in the painting and drawing department of Concordia University. “It was a nice moment of slowing down in workshop work, a moment of calm, of repositioning,” he specifies, in reference to these years spent a lot of (tele)teaching.
So here he is again with a new body of work, and not just paintings, supported in his approach by the discerning eye of a curator, Ji-Yoon Han, a long-time accomplice. For the first time, Burnham’s universe includes sculpture, photography, performance and flirts with theater. Not only does the title of the exhibition announce “three acts”, the installation Slip into the picture, composed of two acrylic paintings, a chair and a tripod, takes on the appearance of a set. Objects and painted images coexist there, reality and representation merge.
It is towards this “mirror” work of our digital age that the artist heads when the time comes to pose for the photographer of the Duty. And as with any good performing arts show, he insists on appearing in costume and even hooded. This is how, in blue from head to toe, he will perform during the “rotations” leading to acts 2 (May 11) and 3 (May 25).
“I enter the space of images that circulate online. Blue, I identify with technology. When you open Windows, there is always blue,” he recalls. The entire tripartite exhibition is carried by a discourse on the immateriality of a world which continues to captivate us – a reflection already present in Anthony Burnham’s work 22 years ago and a first individual exhibition.
He talks more about the transformation of images, “like a jpeg that changes every time you save it”, without obscuring the creative process. “Before, I only presented the final image. Just the result. I told myself that what happens in the process is perhaps as interesting, if not more so, than the result. »
Echo to photography
The new exhibition will provide triple pleasure to those who were bored by his paintings, disconcerting by the simplicity of their composition and by the mimicry they offered of objects taken from reality. The result is overall similar, based on a game of illusions, but the program is now more vast and heterogeneous.
Anthony Burnham, who likes to say that he belongs to a generation of artists who experienced the transition from analog to digital, has always used his camera. Inspired by the conceptual work of Jan Dibbets, who explored the differences between what the eye perceives and what a camera captures, he began exhibiting “paintings to echo photography.”
By staging his photographic images alongside his painted images today, he increases the opportunities to play with a thing and its double, to navigate between what is real and what is not. The link between the 2D works and those in 3D exhibited at the Eli Kerr gallery? An anthropomorphic figure (“the puppet”), sculpted in wood, photographed in a sequence of five images, painted in movement…
Anthony Burnham is not trying to confuse anyone. On the contrary, it plays on transparency. “The idea is to bring a mirror from the workshop. Everything is under construction,” he says, having opted for poor materials, with a “Home Depot aesthetic”: vinyl, scotch tape, tarpaulins, among other things. In Simulacruman inkjet print in latex and on adhesive vinyl, he figures, once again, both visible and invisible, in action or in performance, choreographer and performer.
Happy to have joined a gallery that “accepts exploratory gestures”, the painter-who-does-nothing-more-than-painting also knows he is blessed with the support of Ji-Yoon Han, herself reappeared after her work during the most recent MOMENTA biennial, and the author and critic Katrie Chagnon, who signs a text worthy of a monograph.
“There was a desire to make a publication, but the project did not work out. We decided to bring this text to life, [d’en] make a beautiful PDF, available online. [Comme pour] the diffusion, accessibility, circulation of images,” concludes the artist.