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Please join Robert Burnier and Gertrude on Friday, September 18th for an evening salon at the SoHo House in Chicago. Robert Burnier will be present for the conversation - he is an artist and writer who lives and works in Chicago and is represented by Andrew Rafacz gallery. He creates artworks based on the manipulation of systems and structures, investigating the potential beauty inhered in their disruption.
This Salon is in partnership with Andrew Rafacz gallery and Soho House.
Robert Burnier
"For a long time I have not been able to tolerate making anything directly. I've had to create hurdles, U-turns, dead ends, gaps — or separate my production into stages, which could have years between them. When I estrange my own production it deepens what I can do. Structures that have their own rules become something I can interact with and find alternatives to. Different materials have different limitations. Their specific nature and pre-configuration becomes a historical fact I have to deal with.
For titling the work, I make use of L. L. Zamenhof’s utopian language of Esperanto, developed in the late 19th Century. Esperanto borrowed from existing linguistic traditions in hope of providing a bridge to communicate. This organic approach appeals in its attempt at universality without erasure, without requiring a blank slate mentality, just as I begin with a set structure of material. As well, the translation speaks to the exploration of what combinations are available to us with and also outside of a given discourse or architecture, similar to my process. I dwell on these ideas of failed utopias and the impossibility of communion with the absolute. I don't treat these only as a religious and philosophical questions, but as practical ones. It just doesn't seem to work and can be damaging to try. But we have to continue somehow."
Selected exhibition
About the artist
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 B.S. in Computer Science from Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania. Recent and upcoming exhibitions include Inland Delta at Andrew Rafacz gallery, Chicago; The Chicago Effect: Redefining the Middle at Hyde Park Art Center,...
Source: ArtSlant
