ART REVIEW : Burnham Tries to Be Goofy and Smart

In Linda Burnham’s snazzy paintings, a self-conscious melange of disparate styles and diverse techniques overlap and intersect, but never really settle into resolution or unity.

This sense of incompletion doesn’t signal a weakness in her art, but articulates its sneaky strength. Burnham’s paintings take over the logic of collage, piecing together found objects and elements to form fresh, unanticipated orders.

Her seven humorously titled paintings at Christopher Grimes Gallery want to be both goofy and smart. They deftly combine dynamic, calligraphic flourishes with diagrammatic frogs, bugs, eyes and a laughing bear. They also overlay aggressive optical patterns, saccharine sweet pastels, thick swirls of oil, stylized flowers, faded stains, atmospheric washes and crusty layers of buttery resin.

These potentially disjunctive components are not, however, sufficiently disruptive. Although they’ve been effectively used by Sigmar Polke since the ‘60s, they’ve been overused by a generation of his followers. Burnham’s transitional body of work reveals a talented painter reaching beyond what she’s achieved in the past, but not yet grasping what she will in the future.