Todd Bura
Triple Base, San Francisco, USA
Todd Bura, Your Painting (2009)
Scruffy and small, with exacting, no-nonsense paint application, Todd Bura’s abstractions have the intense interiority of the after-hours painter in his bedsit. Yet, while remaining idiosyncratic and never flagrantly appropriationist, the work of this young Bay Area artist also engages a Modernist lineage that ranges from James McNeill Whistler and Giorgio de Chirico to Kasimir Malevich and William Harnett. The work’s canniness comes out gradually, after the eye has taken in the multitude of visual pleasures proffered.
Your Painting (2009) depicts a picture of a yellow (Christian) cross on a teal ground in which this central icon becomes a kind of strobe flickering beneath an all-over pattern of impasto green stripes. Interlacing opticality and spirituality, the piece toys with the everlasting polemics around artistic and religious belief systems. It’s up to you to decide where you stand, as the title seems to suggest. Such was the case for all of the 14 identically titled new works on view.
Though generally reductivist and leaning towards the geometric, the works manage to test a variety of motifs, formal tactics and painting techniques within this limited purview. In addition to crosses and stripes – including the wavy Bridget Riley-esque type and ones that look like fringes ringing the perimeter – there are trapezoids and constellations of circles. Oil paint might be applied in tonal Whistler-esque washes or in heavily worked layers bearing incised patterns. Bura will position white Constructivist vertical and horizontal bars on top of a choppy bright AbEx background. Another, based on the square within the square – a reoccurring motif – resembles a blank blackboard in a beaten-up white frame. The trompe l’oeil effect sneaks up on you as you realize that the occasional dark spots on the frame double as quite realistically rendered dents and scratches.
A painting uniquely installed high on a narrow side wall at the rear was simply an orange trapezoid centered in the upper portion of a creamy background. Is that shape flat or a postbox into deep space? The viewing angle exaggerates the conundrum. Elsewhere Bura took full advantage of the trapezoid’s built-in illusionism, due to its perspectivally slanting sides, in a dark painting in which a white trapezoid balancing on its tip becomes a foreshortened open door. Further confusing things, unaccountable heraldic emblems peek out from ‘behind’ it, and the white rectangle standing next to it could serve as the open door’s threshold, if only it weren’t slightly off in size and placement. After a while it became apparent that the way perception has been conditioned – and complicated – by the history of painting, is the main subtext here.
Melissa E. Feldman
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