John Yau on Tom Burckhardt for Hyperallergic

John Yau selects Tom Burckhardt: Ulterior Motif as a must-see show in April for Hyperallergic. 

Yau writes, "One of the interesting things about Tom Burckhardt is that he remains unclassifiable, even several years into his career. He has made trompe l'oeil installations of an artist's studio and other environments completely out of cardboard and black paint; reworked and painted secondhand books and pages; and created abstract paintings on molded plastic forms with uneven surfaces and edges. He has moved between figuration and abstraction with an ice skater's grace, seemingly driven by the materials he has at hand. For his latest body of work, he used rolls of canvas and tubes of premixed paint he found in the studio of his mother, artit Yvonne Jacquett, after she passed away. Long interested in pareidolia, which is the guiding principle of Rorschach ink blot tests, and the imagination's desire to reshape abstract images into familiar ones, Burckhardt's past works are mostly in portrait-sized formats. Working on a large scale, the best of his new paintings, go beyond the border between abstraction and figuration. Through form and line, flat areas and shading, he summons weirdly lit worlds." — John Yau