Caroline Burdett

Benrubi Gallery is pleased to present Quiet Truth, an exhibition of new paintings by Caroline Burdett. This is the artist’s first solo show with the gallery.

Burdett paints experience itself—sense, feeling, the texture of being somewhere—and she uses the landscape as a jumping-off point rather than a destination. Her pictures begin from something recognizable: a range of hills, a lake at dusk, two small figures standing at the water’s edge. From there they deviate, and the deviation is the work. Skies go magenta; mountains turn the pink of the inside of a shell; water runs from peach to teal to a violet that exists nowhere but in the feeling of looking at it. This is color chosen for how it feels rather than for how it reports—evocative, unconventional, faithful to mood instead of to appearance.

Scale is part of that feeling. In First Dusk, rounded pink mountains give way to a pale river that threads down through banks of deep blue toward the viewer, and at the bottom of all that saturated immensity stand two tiny figures—their backs to us, looking out. They recur throughout the show, these small paired watchers, dwarfed by the color and entirely at home in it. A companion pair turns up again before a sunset lake, a single red sun caught low in the water, the bond between them pitched somewhere below the level of speech. The pictures are vast and the people in them are minute, and that ratio is the whole emotional argument: we are very small inside what we feel, and not alone in it.

Burdett’s curiosities run well past the picturesque—into science, philosophy, and the spiritual—and rather than hover behind the paintings as subject matter, those interests pass through and become things you can actually look at. “Observable entities that I can interact with.” Several canvases are bordered like illuminated manuscripts or tarot cards, their scenes ringed by hand-painted diamonds, keys, and dots, as though the landscape were also a relic worth keeping. In one, two serpents loop through a desert floor in a slow figure-eight around a single pale eye—infinity, the body, the old snake-knowledge of traditions that never split the sacred from the scientific. The painting doesn’t explain the symbol; it hands it to you as an object.

Sometimes the recognizable loosens its grip altogether. In Melt, lavender and ochre and violet slip over one another like warming strata, and in two large canvases the landscape thins to pure color—Sand and Clay, all warm tan and oxblood washes, and Toward the Light, where ribbons of deep burgundy weave through cream and pale sky-blue toward a single red ember. Burdett breaks her painting sessions with physical movement, and you can feel it in the work—the trace of a painter who steps back, shakes loose, and returns. The play she describes is not a metaphor but a method.

Caroline Burdett (b. 1983, Chicago, IL) is a contemporary painter whose work aims, through the language of color, form, and texture, to express both thoughts and feelings on the nature of existence; human and otherwise. Using an evolving range of mediums and surfaces, Burdett creates color-forward paintings that lean toward abstraction. She has completed residencies at Byrdcliffe and the Vermont Studio Center. Burdett has studied art at the Instituto Allende in Mexico, the Chicago Academy for the Arts, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and the Art Institute of Chicago, and has recently exhibited at Site Brooklyn, Pink Water Gallery, Kingston Social, Calico Exhibitions, Ravenwood, and Cut Teeth. She holds a Masters degree from the University of Chicago in clinical social work and maintains a small private psychotherapy practice when she is not painting.

Burdett lives and works in the Hudson Valley, New York.