Gallery Notes

Our first encounter with the paintings exhibited here gives us the impression that we are looking at photographic snapshots. Upon closer viewing, we must wonder why we have this impression. Birkner’s manner is very painterly, lacking the detailed articulation we normally associate with "photographic realism." The formal appeal of his work lies, in fact, in the spontaneity of the brushwork and in the artist’s uncanny sense of the minimum amount of description required to invoke an image. Our sense of the painting as a snapshot is also belied by the strong structural clarity of each composition. In Altoona Boogie-Woogie (Remembering Mondrian), a pronounced central recession is framed by large peripheral masses, giving almost the impression of a stage, while the human interaction in Small Gang takes place within a grid-like framework of horizontal and vertical forces. Finally, when we glance around the gallery, we realize that each painting has a decided overall hue, as though the image were being viewed through a colored filter, clearly something which would not be possible if the artist’s intent were to literally describe.

We come back to the question, then, why these paintings strike us as photographic. And the answer to this question lies more in what is depicted than in how it is depicted. In nearly every composition, the painter has chosen to depict a moment in a temporal continuum. It has not been a casual choice, however, because the subject of each painting clearly implies a time before and a time afterward. Each is an interrupted action, a cross-section view into a sequence of events. Its proper photographic analogue is a still from a movie reel. To understand the modernity of Birkner’s method, we must compare these images to traditional scenes in a realist manner, where the boundaries of the painting frame a timeless world. Even though the scene may be in motion or depict a dramatic action, traditional realist images require little more of the viewer than the information he or she already possesses.

In Birkner’s paintings, by contrast, the viewer acutely senses his lack of information. Their drama lies in our curiosity about the relationship among the people, what they are doing, or where they are going. The irony of the work lies in the fact that these are ordinary people and everyday situations, which we would normally exclude from the focus of our attention. Extracted from context and frozen in time, however, they are able to provoke our imagination - to generate mystery and intrigue. They also make us question why these people, these places and these moments have been selected to become the subjects of art.

All facets of Birkner’s art speak to the issue of visual selection. In the application of paint, the artist’s style might be described as selective rather than accumulative, maintaining only a minimum of detail necessary to invoke the image and selecting only small portions of the image to retain focus. This forces the viewer to acknowledge how little within our field of vision we actually see. By placing thin washes of paint over the image, Birkner also makes it appear slightly out of focus, as though viewed in motion or through a veil of memory. And the dominance of hue makes us realize that the eye (or the mind) does not register color in precise detail, but selects and subordinates lesser to dominant colors. In the images Birkner gives us here, he asks us to ponder visual selection and to recognize that sight, cognition, and memory form indistinguishable components of the act of vision. Birkner's paintings ask us to ponder why we see what we see and, equally importantly, how much we don’t see of what is before us.

Tom Birkner has received numerous awards and grants for his painting including the Ford Foundation Fellowship; Vermont Studio Center, the New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowship, and the Graham Fellowship from the Pennsylvania State University School of Art and Architecture. He exhibits regularly in New York City, University Park, PA, and in Bologna, Italy as well as throughout the East Coast region. Birkner’s work has been the subject of many publications and has been reviewed in such major art magazines as Art News, and NY ARTS. Birkner lives in Brooklyn, NY with his wife Claire and works in Hoboken, NJ.
-JH

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