Exhibition - Patrick Burke ‘Personages and Performers’

I ring Patrick Burke to find out more about his exhibition at Charleston, with images of two of his intriguing paintings on my desktop. In both of them a solitary character floats in a contextless space: one man sits on a stool with his eyes closed, another rather furtively carries two drinks across the frame. Who are these characters? Where do they come from and where are they going? A call to Mr Burke leaves me none the wiser. He talks about composition, about creating a tension on the canvas. I’m looking for more personal answers. Are these figures representing modern alienation? “Not at all.”

Mr Burke has an important ally in the incredibly influential art critic Norbert Lynton, who has written the programme notes for this exhibition. “They [Burke’s paintings] are painted with meticulous skill,” he writes; “their placing, scale, colours, volumes and visual weight finely adjusted to give us a sense of their near-reality, though clearly they belong to another world.” And: “born of his imagination, they enter ours.” And, most pertinently: “who and what are these persons, active and inactive, solitary or brought together for some sort of interaction, or none?” Perhaps we will never know. AL