Andrew Burgess

Noir in Colour

23 November - 19 December 2005
E & R Cyzer Gallery, 33 Davies Street, Mayfair, W1, Tel: +44 (0) 20 7629 0100

New themes are emerging in the recent paintings of artist Andrew Burgess. A trip to Miami has resulted in a series of dark and moody paintings of Art Deco hotels and classic 1950’s cars in Miami’s famous South Beach district. One has the feeling that Burgess is fashioning the scene like a film director, manipulating light and mood in a film noir style – nostalgic and enigmatic.
Like Eugène Atgét’s photographs, Burgess’s paintings are strangely depopulated, as if a human drama has already taken place, but the actors have left the stage. The effect is surreal. The image looks like
a crime scene, and ordinary objects become ominous. Time itself seems captured and frozen. Cars often replace humans as the sole sources of movement and action. Novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, a long-time collector of Burgess’s work, notes a connection with classic American comic books, and Burgess himself compares his transformation of cityscapes to the transformation of New York to “Gotham City”, where buildings sit uneasily next to each other, with angles askew, even listing dangerously to one side.
A similar drama takes place in Burgess’s paintings of London suburbs; familiarity and banality are transformed by dramatic skies and silhouetted trees. There is a retro feel to this series of paintings, which play with the viewer’s memory. Recognisable places become imaginative settings, not quite as one remembers, manipulated to heighten visual response. These more photographic representations offer a greater focus on the minutiae and texture of urban spaces, previously obliterated from Burgess’s work.
Photography has been an important tool for Andrew Burgess in documenting his surroundings at home and when travelling, but this exhibition is the first in which Burgess has exhibited his photographs alongside his paintings. Despite purchasing a state-of-the-art digital camera, one series of photographs was taken using an old-fashioned medium format camera, picked up in Spitalfields Market. This quirky camera is clumsy and low-tech, but takes beautiful and dream-like pictures. Sometimes the camera leaks light and requires taping up; the effect is recognisable in the soft focus and vignetting.