Bob Burchman: New and Recent Paintings

About

Like his predecessors, Burchman favors images of transparency, translucency and reflectivity. But whereas the original photorealists would often focus on the department store display windows, diners, gas stations and car dealerships of the commercial American streetscape, Burchman refocuses the photorealist project onto the sites of high culture—art galleries, private collections and, most notably, the art museum. There he directs his camera phone at protective plexiglass frames and other reflective surfaces, capturing both the underlying image and surface reflections—other artworks, attentive viewers, gallery architecture, lighting devices—and then represents these interactions in the series of oil-on-canvas paintings which follow. And it is there too, inside the museum, where this artist’s work takes an unexpectedly personal turn as it becomes apparent that Burchman, a largely self-trained outsider, is motivated by a complex mixture of respect and resentment. “Pick me! Why aren’t I in the museum? Why them and not not me?," Burchman’s paintings seem to ask. Such raw emotions, which other more thoroughly trained and professionalized artists frequently share but are careful not to express, expose a sense of vulnerability that gives these already thoughtful and expertly realized artworks an additionally haunting power.