Damascus Gate Ricky Burnett
17 May – 7June 2014
“To the Palestinians it was the Bab al-Amud, the Gate of the Column,
but Lucas rejoiced in the common English name, the suggestion of a
route toward mystery, interior light, sudden transformation. He sat for a
while over a Sprite, taking in the sensations of the gate, and then set out
quixotically in search of something stronger.”
—Robert Stone, Damascus Gate
1.
31 x 23 cm
2013/14
2.
20.5 x 25.5 cm
2013/14
3.
23 x 31 cm
2013/14
4.
23 x 31 cm
2013/14
5.
31 x 23 cm
2013/14
6.
41 x 31 cm
2013/14
7.
31 x 23 cm
2013/14
9.
23 x 31 cm
2014
10.
36 x 26 cm
2014
11.
21 x 25.5 cm
2014
13.
21 x 25.5 cm
2014
14.
36 x 46 cm
2014
15.
21 x 25.5 cm
2014
16.
23 x 31 cm
2014
18.
25.5 x 21 cm
2014
22.
15.5 x 20.5 cm
2014
23.
15.5 x 20.5 cm
2014
21.
15.5 x 20.5 cm
2014
20.
23 x 31 cm
2014
19.
23 x 31 cm
2014
24.
18 x 23 cm
2014
30.
31 x 30 cm
2014
29.
23 x 31 cm
2014
12.
30.5 x 30.5 cm
2014
Reflections on Constellations in Ricky Burnett’s Damascus Gate
“On every new thing there lies already the shadow of annihilation. For the history of
every individual, of every social order, indeed of the whole world, does not describe
an ever-widening, more and more wonderful arc, but rather follows a course which,
once the meridian is reached, reaches without fail down into the dark.”
– W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn
The paintings in Ricky Burnett’s Damascus Gate are
deceptively simple. Small objects, made up of thickly
painted bands and strips of monochromatic colour,
densely painted and punctured surfaces, which cohere
rhythmically. Their sense of balance derives from an
inner logic, inner but also outer as several canvasses
derive from the inner logic of previous paintings and
photographs of architectural structures. Thresholds.
Burnett finds patterns the way an astronomer finds
images in the stars. Both explore the spaces between,
which, if you look closely, form luminous constellations
in the dark.
The canvasses withhold any sense of narrative and
avoid making statements. They are inward turned, selfabsorbed carriers of nothing more than paint, the very
materiality of which is the only subject matter.
The paintings are internally coherent, even or
especially when the paint exceeds and coagulates at the
edges of the canvas. Every part relates to every other part:
composition is everything. Elegantly brittle, the paintings
hold together like skin. Nothing is out of place: every mark,
bruise, smear, stain and incision makes sense. You can
feel it.
Clearly these are products of concentrated thinking
and intentionality, but also of blind feeling in the dark. One
can sense the painter’s painstaking consideration in every
cut, furrow, groove, line, thickly loaded brushstroke and
erasure, while every decision derives from doubt.
The materiality of the paint contributes to the
physicality of the paintings. They may be small, but they
have body. One can think of this in terms of the writer Don
DeLillo’s observation that he uses a typewriter because he
likes to watch the letters stamped into the paper. As if the
words are material things, with generative substance. As
if every letter matters.
Here there are no declarations about the politics of
identity, which motivates so much contemporary South
African art, ad nauseum. There is no tedious, superficial
babbling about the role of art in society: the completely
pretentious idea that art can make a difference to actual
suffering. Burnett does not buy into the dubious notion
that art must be an exercise in academic, sociological
and psychological posturing. The paintings are nothing
17.
18 x 23 cm
2014
more than paintings, the remainders of hours of solitary
labour and craft, and it is precisely this that gives them
presentness: grace revealed in exile, absconding, loss
and longing.
“…long wanderings in a world that is no longer in a
state of grace.”
– W. G. Sebald, “The Alps in the Sea”
Materiality is another word for sensuality. Working on a
painting is a sensual process, no matter how hard: no
matter how little the painting yields. It is hard work to
keep working at tenderness, especially in a graceless
world, in which there isn’t time enough for tenderness. It
takes practice and patience.
Materiality is sensuality: the very idea involves touch.
Touch is way to experience the world as “fleshness”,
to cite Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
When a painting invites us to touch it – and of course
paintings in galleries and museums don’t allow us
that kind of intimacy – it takes on the form of a lover’s
discourse. The painting becomes a body. And bodies need
to be touched. The very idea of the skin of a body is one
of sensuality. Indeed skin gets hurt, it gets bruised and
cut. Skin can break out in a rash. Skin ages, wrinkles and
becomes thin and perhaps this makes it less attractive.
In a world of airbrushed flat bodies, the idea of a material
and fragile body may seem distasteful. But as Walter
Benjamin observed beautifully: the beloved’s body is
beautiful precisely in its wrinkles and blemishes.
Beauty is all in the line and in the curve.
The body has thickness; so does the world. We are in
the world in our bodies. And paintings as bodies take up
space, even if they seem to float in time, over time, often
as afterimages in our memories. Weightless.
Paintings as material objects linger on in our
memories long after we have felt them physically. We
reach out for them even here: as virtual things. Dream
images.
The idea of a painting as afterimage relates to the
stars, which we see shining in the night sky long after they
have died. Their light reaches us only after they are gone,
which means looking at the stars is a form of yearning: a
longing for what shines even in its loss.
The starry heavens are holes in the world. There
are other holes too, here on earth. The universe is a
constellation of holes.
The stars form constellations and it is this very idea that
informs Burnett’s paintings. Every painting in Damascus
Gate is a constellation in itself and forms a constellation
with the other paintings in the exhibition, which themselves form a constellation with Robert Stone’s novel
Damascus Gate, also a constellation, and constellations
with paintings from the history of art, in particular Giotto’s
“The Life of Christ” series from his chapel in Padua, and
with architectural structures from cities he has visited:
Morocco and Spain.
Using a drawing and painting app on his iPad, Burnett
roughly outlined the inner logic of Giotto’s paintings, which
consist of straight and curving lines, circles and pyramids.
I would refer to this inner structure as a constellation.
The architectural structure of the paintings is offset by
rhythmical curving lines, which give the paintings a sense
of inner beauty and grace – something Giotto pictures
inherent in the figure of Christ. Burnett sketched these
lines onto a series of canvasses as structures, which
determined the abstractions that followed. The paintings
are deeply textured, thickly painted and sensual surfaces,
which are held together by this inner constellation. But
Burnett effaces the narrative and what remains are black
“bullet holes”, points – the very essence that holds Giotto’s
paintings together. These holes are like stars in a somber
yet luminous sky.
There is something uncannily prescient about
the series of photographs of architectural structures
and frescoes, which Burnett took in Fez in 1986 and
in Barcelona in 2013. The shapes, the architectural
structures, the little black windows, the sense of inner
proportion and inner logic, threshold and the aura of a
luminous void: it as if the paintings were already present
in the photographs. Past is in a constellation with the
present, as these photographs are in a constellation
with Burnett’s paintings. As Benjamin observed, image
is a constellation, which flashes up in the moment of
41. Composition after Giotto 1
61 x 76.5 cm
2014
recognition. When such coincidences occur, we sense
or recognize patterns the way W. G. Sebald does in
his writings.
“…one of those coincidences that really is no such
thing. […] At that moment of recognition I felt
touched by the sensation, so rare in our emotional
lives, of almost complete weightlessness.”
– W. G. Sebald, “Moments Musicaux”
Entanglement, intertwinement, and labyrinth:
strange order in randomness, sense in
senselessness.
Weightlessness is grace.
If image is constellation, the constellation is, what
Benjamin called, a “thought image” or “thinking image”.
Points connecting with other points: we think through
and in it. Constellations involve time: the time of being
formed, seen, read, and written about; also the time
of disappearance. Constellations are mobile: eternal
but also fleeting, like our thoughts. Constellations
change depending on your point of view. It is a matter of
perspective.
Every painting in Damascus Gate is an encounter. Self
encounters other, this encounters that, image encounters
object, the present encounters the past, line encounters
surface, body encounters world and vice versa.
An encounter involves shifting, turning,
reestablishing, reinvigorating.
An encounter involves a crossing.
Stars encounter other stars in constellations, as do
points. Light encounters darkness and darkness produces
light. Piercing points of light in a dark edifice. We see stars
in their disappearance, which linger on long after – as
aura: a strange weave of distance and proximity.
“It is no accident that Benjamin employs the word
Gespinst (weave) in his definition of aura, a German
word close to Gespenst (ghost or specter).
– Gerhard Richter, “Adorno and the Excessive
Politics of Aura”.
Ghosts.
Everything that is, has already been and will be.
We name these woven constellations, haunted and
layered with the ghosts of other constellations in order to
navigate the patterns on earth. Pathmarks. As above so
below, heaven on earth, history in the present, one image
lingering behind or after another: we feel our way in the
dark by reading/connecting infinite points or holes in the
sky and in material things. Blind spots are also luminous,
and we connect them to form images that seem internally
coherent. Image is intertwinement. Shadow intertwined
with shadow, depth with surface, and body with body.
Weightless edifice. What role does mind play if mind
cannot comprehend itself? How brief is our illumination?
“What we perceive are no more than isolated lights in
the abyss of ignorance, in the shadow-filled edifice of
the world.”
– W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn
Images have a strange luminescence, which derives from
combustion. Explosion from within: the birth of new stars
in the dying and disappearance of others. The universe is
born every moment anew. Or perhaps this birth is just the
intensifying glow from the past. It has already happened:
it is the afterimage that burns on.
“Combustion,” writes W. G. Sebald in The Rings of
Saturn, “is the hidden principle behind every artifact we
create. The making a fish-hook, manufacture of a china
cup, or production of a television programme, all depend
of the same process of combustion. Like our bodies
and like our desires, the machines we have devised are
possessed of a heart which is slowly reduced to embers.
From the earliest times, human civilization has been no
more than a strange luminescence growing more intense
by the hour, of which no one can say when it will begin to
wane and when if will fade away.”
The heart of the paintings on display in Damascus
Gate is black. Black emerges from each painting as its
ground. Paradoxically this black ground is groundless.
Void. Black. Black bile: another word for melancholia. And
the latter is marked by both debilitation and inspiration.
Mark Rothko described blackness as emanating of light.
Black light.
The “ideal of blackness” is, as Adorno writes in
Aesthetic Theory, “one of the deepest impulses of
abstraction.” To follow that impulse, to reach a place
“where no star, no light is visible, where there is
nothing, where nothing is forgotten because nothing
is remembered, where it is night, where it is nothing,
nothing, void.”
“…in the darkness, he explored the spaces between
the stars with his telescope.”
– W. G. Sebald, “Constructs of Mourning”
Place, space, void and the liminal: nothingness of
nothingness marked by crossings. Yet something is there
after all: sensuality. How does this paradox work? How
can there be sensuality in nothingness? If one is gentle
enough, it one is attuned to the fact that everything
passes with time, one may recognize the patterns, the
constellations and layers that give form to our otherwise
formless lives. Be sensitive and open to it. Relinquish
yourself to the image as one would to a lover, “and fulfill
the work in its own terms,” to quote Adorno.
Again: it is the lover’s body, with all its wrinkles and
creases, this mortal body that draws us in. We touch it
and we are touched by it. It glows ever deeper and more
intensely while life lasts.
This body is a constellation. It has many points. Body
is threshold. We reach out for it in the void. We cross it.
It won’t be crossed. It is marked by loss, which someone
once said, is as good as having. Light of black: the harder
the work of seeing and feeling in the dark, the deeper the
meaning.
“…a thing is never truly perceived, appreciated or
defined except in longing. A land in exile, a God in His
absconding, a love in its loss. And that everyone loses
everything in the end. But that certain things of their
nature cannot be taken away while life lasts. Some
things can never be lost utterly that were loved in a
certain way.”
– Robert Stone, Damascus Gate
Dr Gerhard Schoeman
Johannesburg, April 25, 2014
8.
61 x 45.5 cm
2013/14
25.
18.5 x 23 cm
2014
27.
18.5 x 23 cm
2014
26.
31 x 23 cm
2014
28.
18 x 23 cm
2014
31.
20.5 x 26 cm
2014
32.
20.5 x 26 cm
2014
33.
21 x 30 cm
2014
34.
20.5 x 25.5 cm
2014
35.
20.5 x 25.5 cm
2014
37.
15.5 x 20.5 cm
2014
38.
15.5 x 20.5 cm
2014
36.
25.5 x 36 cm
2014
39.
23.5 x 30.5 cm
2014
40. Composition after Bellini
40.5 x 51 cm
2014
42. Composition after Giotto 2
61 x 76.5 cm
2014
43. Composition after Giotto 3
61 x 76.5 cm
2014
Ricky Burnett
Ricky is a painter and teacher of painting. During the late 70’s and early 80’s he taught at
the Johannesburg Art Foundation of which he was a founder member. He then went on to
curate two of the more significant exhibitions in our history, Tributaries and a retrospective
of Jackson Hlungwane. As a director of Newtown Galleries he curated numerous large,
eclectic and innovative exhibitions. Most recently he curated Horse for the Everard Read
Gallery. He currently runs a private teaching studio.
Gerhard Schoeman
Gerhard is an art historian, writer, critic and artist. His PhD dissertation is titled
Melancholy Constellations: Walter Benjamin, Anselm Kiefer, William Kentridge and the
Imaging of History as Catastrophe (2007). He has published widely on contemporary art
and philosophy, as well as on contemporary South African art. He is a regular contributor
to Art South Africa and is a member of its editorial committee. He recently completed
two books: Short Shadows, a book of cultural criticism, and Thinking Photographs. He has
contributed essays to several art catalogues. He most recently completed seven short
essays for the book Just Ask! edited by Simon Njami and Sean O’Toole, which will be
published by the Goethe Institute of South Africa. Special thanks to Rosemary and Gerhard, both pillars of the ‘gate’.
Published by Ricky Burnett, Johannesburg, 2014
© Photographs Bob Cnoops
© Text Gerhard Schoeman
© Portrait photograph Roz Berzen
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any
form or by an electronic means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying
and recording, or in an information or retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publishers.
The essay was typeset in Akkurat Pro. The catalogue was printed and bound in South
Africa by Wet Ink on Mohawk Superfine Ultra White Eggshell 148 gsm.
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