Steve Burnham's Bizarre Portraiture at Portrait Society

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Steve Burnham gives us plenty to look at in his show “Unlike My Image” at Portrait Society Gallery (through Feb. 3). Fifty-two works to be exact, half of them on paper and half on canvas. Most are vertically oriented and around 20 x 16 inches. The compositional diversity in the show makes it difficult to pin Burnham down as a painter or to tidily characterize his work, which happens to be the exhibition’s greatest blessing, and its greatest curse, but a curse he should carry with pride.

The consistency in size and wonderful inconsistency of mark making contributes to a sense of speed and improvisational looseness. However, it turns out that Burnham is actually a measured and discerning composer—this show bears the products of over two years’ work. Even so, “Unlike My Image” feels as if it’s been made in a convulsive fit of uninterrupted energy. So, to scrutinize a single painting here as one would a Tintoretto or a Poussin would confer an undue preciousness and premeditation on it. The way into it is rather to take the whole cosmos of the show in and freely search for meaningful constellations.

One of my favorites of those constellations is an acrylic and spray paint work cryptically titled The Anxiety of the Flower’s Ghost. While he is compositionally all over the map, Burnham does lean on the frontal portrait as a preferred device. This one is slightly more obvious than others as a face, with radiating bands of color emanating from behind the skull-like form atop a black background and bursts of multicolored spray paint. An orange ribbon snakes from the eye holes and into and around its nose. Deathly, as representational subject matter, but completely alive as a painting. Another bizarre portrait, titled Accessories Before and After the Fact, mummifies the head of its subject in straps of acrylic paint with slight relief, topped by what might be a rose and a hair pin. It is grotesque where Anxiety is macabre; a dark comedy while the other is simply dark.

Any two works in this show could easily become the basis of some kind of Mad Libs-esque parlor game of unexpected adjectival collisions. This reflects a certain stream-of-consciousness impulsivity in his work. Streams of consciousness, though, can often be diarrheic and indulgent. But Burnham is a willing and able composer, re-worker, and embellisher. There are countless allusions to art history and politics buried in his improvisatory oddness. Titles like Presidential Mirror and Remember Postmodernism speak to the guile lurking beneath the informality. I’ll save the spoilers and let you discover them on your own. Suffice it to say that one gathers quickly that this isn’t childish stuff, but rather the work of an artist who has deliberately freed himself from the inhibitions and strictures of the left-brained, analytic adult world in order to stretch the possibilities of his own painting. Picasso famously said that we are all born artists, the difficult part is to remain one as we grow up. Burnham’s work is fighting to confirm this statement while simultaneously embracing the wisdom that accrues with age.

Picasso’s statement represents one of the most sensitive trip wires in contemporary art, one that alienates many who would otherwise like to enter that world. The phrase “my child could make that” has turned into a cliché jab at informal art, and one reclaimed by artists to mock the philistinism of anyone who would use it unironically. But the insiders might have a little more sympathy as most non-artists have been forced to disavow the primal instincts they’ve spent a lifetime overcoming: imagination, play, expression, inhibition. To those tripped up, they might try to be as fearlessly creative as a 3-year-old, to help remind them of how astoundingly difficult it is. Like most polarizing conflicts, the answer here is “somewhere in between”; art requires a blend of youthful abandon and mature awareness. And ample portions of each are on view in “Unlike my Image.”