Robert Burnier, Proksima Kalkulado, 2014. Aluminium, liquitex spray paint, 38 × 39". Courtesy of Andrew Rafacz Gallery.

Robert Burnier, Alia, Unu Alian, Alia, 2014. Primer on aluminium, variable (approx. 6 × 7 × 11"). Courtesy of Andrew Rafacz Gallery.

Robert Burnier, Pado, 2014. Acrylic, lacquer, wood, 36 × 34 × 28". Courtesy of Andrew Rafacz Gallery.

Robert Burnier, Terra Desegna, 2014. Copper, rubber, 41 × 41 × 4". Courtesy of Andrew Rafacz Gallery.

Robert Burnier is an artist and writer who lives and works in Chicago. He is an MFA candidate in Painting and Drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and holds a BS in Computer Science from Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania. He is currently represented by Andrew Rafacz Gallery, Chicago, and has shown his work in numerous exhibitions in Chicago, New York, Miami, and Los Angeles. He is also a writer for Bad at Sports and Chicago Artist Writers, appearing additionally as an occasional lecturer at several Chicago area universities.

Inland Delta at Andrew Rafacz Gallery (19 September–8 November 2014)

‘“Imagine a vast sheet of paper on which straight Lines, Triangles, Squares, Pentagons, Hexagons, and other figures, instead of remaining fixed in their places, move freely about, on or in the surface, but without the power of rising above or sinking below it, very much like shadows – only hard and with luminous edges – and you will then have a pretty correct notion of my country and countrymen. Alas, a few years ago, I should have said ‘my universe:’ but now my mind has been opened to higher views of things.” – Edwin A. Abbott, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, 1884.

‘Two eyes set parallel in the front of the human head provide a line of sight with limitations and subjective peculiarities. Objects observed by other methods likely appear fundamentally different. Take the rabbit who, having eyes on either side of its skull, can see 360 degrees around its body at once. Their visually immersive experience of the world nevertheless affords a central blind spot in front of their nose making any three-dimensional experience of nearby objects impossible. A tennis ball by their feet, for example, would read like a flat circle. Or consider the Barreleye fish, a strange deep sea creature with tubular lenses inside of its semi-transparent head. Its lenses are sensitive enough to recognize flitting prey as it swims overhead, like shadow puppets passing across a back lit screen. Any time they direct their attention to the ceiling of the ocean, they invariably look through their own semi-transparent gelatinous matter. Add to that their additional ability to look straight forward, over the top of their very small mouths. Such fish must experience depth in an entirely different fashion, but countless other examples exist. Different modes of sensory apprehension – sight, smell, touch etc. – combine with physical constraints – the setting of one’s eyes is just one example – to engender different systems of logic, and desire. Within each logical system, the same objects appear to one another: the tennis ball, the ocean, the rabbit, the plastic bag, the human, all manifesting differently according to the subjective proclivities of its beholder. 

‘But what logics might inert structures possess? At the Hyde Park Art Center, Robert Burnier’s sculpture Revokon sits in the main gallery of their group exhibit Chicago Effect: Redefining Art in the Middle, with enough presence to suggest an answer. The all-gray cube balances on one corner, on the brink of motion, corners docked to reveal small windows into its interior space. One is drawn in to that interior with a desire to understand its contents, as though in doing so we might learn some concrete secret about this object. Inside you see what looks like a shelf, and ribbing alongside the shelf that would protect and secure it. This crate was built to sustain and protect its contents. Nevertheless, one cannot perceive anything particular beyond about the wooden slats it is so vehemently protecting – every surface concealed in the same matte gray. The box, then, eludes the human eye even while it compels us to study its form.

‘At such times one is forced to acknowledge the bounds of human subjectivity. Imagine the experience of an ant traveling the surface of Revokon, for example, or the tennis ball’s sensation as it rebounded against the smooth wooden surface; even the ground, bearing the weight of Burnier’s hovering crate, responds to its pressure and shade. Although Revokon is undoubtedly the same object in every instance that it appears, it nevertheless appears differently to each subjective witness. But how do we imagine those different perspectives, to apprehend the same object through different means at once? In doing so, we may learn something more about the nature of the object at hand, while reciprocally gaining insight into the bounds of our human world. Burnier’s exhibit at Andrew Rafacz Gallery, Inland Delta, exemplifies that effort. By employing a range of strategies – from wire drawings, to two-dimensional aluminum patterns, to folded aluminum sculptures, and deconstructed crates – Burnier shows a range of almost mathematical exercises, each of which aim to arrive at a more complex understanding of the object itself. 

‘Jane Bennett adeptly describes the way humanity has thus far privileged animate matter over the inert, a remarkably automatic postulate drawn so long ago, it is rarely reconsidered. And yet here are Burnier’s sculptures – Alia, Unu Alian, Alia – a series of three dimensional aluminum objects that hang off the wall, absorbing light with the same even coat of matte, green paint. These objects appear like the cast-off material of a minimalist exercise. They appear like reconfigured body parts of a no-longer-identifiable computer; they might even seem like the detritus of tools exhausted from war without bearing the trauma a human body might convey. The series appears formally complete, not entirely familiar to human use even while they emerge among us, radiating a strange aesthetic potency that, once again, draws the viewer in with the desire to discern what indeed these things are up to.

‘Aferon Kvar behaves similarly; seated on the floor this time, it is nevertheless in the same distinct family as Alia, Unu Alian, Alia. One might even suggest they inhabit the same “world.” Like that aforementioned series, Aferon Kvar’s weight is difficult to apprehend by pure observation: Is it heavy or light? Is it made of paper or metal? Will it be rough or smooth? One wants to situate the object firmly within a set of binaries, even while the object itself resists being pinned down. Its presence is tied first and foremost to the ambiguity of its material, its relationship to gravity, and even light. There remains a dogged sense that these sculptures withhold something about themselves – containing an interior reason not entirely accessible to the viewer ... Burnier’s work in Inland Delta pushes his material concerns beyond a single interrogative approach, as he divines – or searches for – the same object again and again through different materials. It is as though every work emerges from a separate fancy bubble (to borrow Uexküll’s phrase), each with a separate set of proclivities. The flat unfolded aluminum pattern, Proksima Kalkulado, corresponds directly to its well-folded counter parts, like a dress pattern that points to its affiliated gown. As such, it offers a glimpse of Burnier’s process. Yet his flat templates are not simply waiting to be folded up into three dimensions, they are also complete in and of themselves; they hang as final conclusions, representing the same three-dimensional object in two-dimensional space. Similarly, the wire piece, Terra Desegna, appears as a line drawing of its three-dimensional peers. The piece hangs on the wall like the corollary diagram generated by a computer after it has scanned the three-dimensional form. Burnier thus employs different restricted vocabularies to illustrate different modes of access to the material world. Rather than viewing each sculpture as a discrete object, he encourages us instead to recognize each piece as another facet of one particular thing, like channels spreading out of the same river, and stretching into land.

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‘Upon the discovery of new logics, strange things can happen. By proposing, for instance, that the shortest distance between two points is a curved line rather than a straight one, a whole new mathematics occurs: a non-Euclidean geometry that subsequently laid the ground for Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity. Suddenly space and time bend. Or further back, and against social convention, Copernicus places the sun at the center of our universe, rather than the earth – suddenly the orderly movement of our planetary bodies became apparent – their movement across the heavens was a simple rather than epicyclical pattern. In Abbott’s romance, I’d even wager that his Flatlanders’ discovery of three-dimensional space was so revolutionary as to render their prior social hierarchies suspect. In other words, these abstract studies have real and sudden bearing on the world.’ – Caroline Picard, Catalogue Essay, Inland Delta (Chicago: Andrew Rafacz Gallery, 2014), pp. 1–3 (pp. 1–3).