Noir in Colour

An introduction to the catalogue for a new exhibition by artist Andrew Burgess, presented by the Cynthia Corbett Gallery 23 November to 19 December 2005

Most people remember what they were doing on September 11, 2001 but Andy Burgess's memory of that day is especially sharp. It was the opening night of an exhibition of his work at the xx gallery on Cork Street. Despite everything, people still came – and found themselves looking at paintings that suddenly carried a shocking new charge.

For Burgess had made Manhattan his muse, gazing at, photographing and painting the city for the best part of a decade. He had fallen in love with the noise, the hubbub, the skyscrapers that make narrow streets feel like canyons, even the claustrophobia of a buzzing, heaving city. On display that night was a clutch of his New York pictures, including two depicting the Twin Towers. They sold immediately, that very evening. “These are now historical pieces,” said the buyer.

There was pressure on the artist to repeat them, to reproduce his impressions of the World Trade Center. But he could not do it. Tribeca, the neighbourhood closest to the Twin Towers, had been his home when he stayed in Manhattan: the shock of 9/11 felt personal and direct. He admits now that the events of that September day affected him so badly, that for a while he simply could not go back to the city he loved.

Now, four years later, Burgess is exhibiting again – and the effect of 9/11 is visible. Like the best artists who have absorbed the shock of those attacks, his angle on them is oblique. They are not his subject matter; his pictures are in no way about that day of dread. Instead, one can discern a shift in his work after September 2001, a palpable change in mood.

In his earlier paintings, Burgess found streets or buildings bathed in strong sunshine. His cityscapes of Boston or New York came in bright colours, borrowing Pop Art's cartoonish blocks and patterns. The exuberance of 1990s America was on show: confident, prosperous, almost infantile in its contentment.

In the newer work, the skies are not as blue. In Times Square, the sky is dark and lowering; the buildings look too tall, suddenly vulnerable. From the ground, Burgess's eye sees what many New Yorkers (and others) detected when they looked upward: menace. Rainy Afternoon in Chelsea betrays a melancholy imperceptible before 9/11.

Perhaps most striking is the set of paintings from Miami. Miami Carpark captures a moment of dark and rain that will resonate with anyone who has experienced the humid storminess of a Florida evening. It is quintessential America: cars, a shopping mall, extreme weather. It also represents a technical advance by Burgess, his ability to render poor light, as well as the damp yellow haze of a headlight in the rain, just one demonstration of the subtlety of his skill.

In these newer paintings he has caught something that lies beneath the surface of the United States, something less visible in the sweeping panoramas of before. It is the quiet thrum of day to day life, which yet carries a hint of the ominous. There is a kinship here with some of the finest 20th century American artists, from Philip Guston to Edward Hopper. But it is no surprise that Burgess also cites the writers Jonathan Franzen and Richard Ford among his influences: he shares their ability to evoke the brooding and troubled beneath the domestic and mundane.

Recently, he has turned that same clear eye on his hometown. Once again, one can pick up the sense of foreboding even in a landscape that, on the outside at least, appears to be free of threat. His treatments of suburban north London, The Vale and Ossulton Way, show that Burgess can find mystery where others would pass by. Plenty of painters could see the potential of Manhattan; it takes a deeper gaze to find inspiration in Finchley.

This represents a challenge by Burgess to his audience. For a cultural cringe can sometimes operate in Britain, one that makes us, if not ashamed of our own landscape, then slow to see the drama in it. There are few British songs about Stoke or Middlesborough, to match the American hymns to Galveston or Nebraska, but Burgess refuses to succumb to that tendency. Like Constable, Gainsborough or Turner, he can see that Britain too has a story. And it is not only the narrative of the rural, English idyll that aches to be told: the city, and even the suburbs, are worth staring at.

What we see is revealing of both him and us. For there is a nostalgia in these paintings, perhaps surprising in an artist who is not yet forty. The sweet, slow charm of the English seaside infuses his Beach Huts, Southwold. Warner Village, Leicester Square appears as a series of Art Deco buildings, echoing the Marlin and Breakwater paintings of 1930s hotels on the South Beach waterfront. (Tellingly, Burgess has his eye on the Hoover Building and the Rio Cinema of Dalston as future subjects.)

In Ford Anglia in Golders Green this interest in the past is exquisitely distilled. If the challenge faced by an artist is to capture surfaces in paint, turning pigment and oil into the world we see around us – its objects, light and motion – then this piece rises to it magnificently. The metallic sheen of the car, the crumbling brickwork, the weight of the clouds – it is all there.

But below the surface, there is a sadness in the picture, the inkling that something has been lost. “We can't help but lament the passing of time,” says Burgess, who like Marcel Proust or Virginia Woolf before him, is preoccupied with the certainty that, as Louis MacNiece had it, “We cannot cage the minute.” Some artists try to defy that logic and freeze a moment of time. Burgess paints something more elusive: the knowledge that we can do no such thing.

Posted on November 11, 2005 08:37 PM

---