Not Just Another Flower Painting – Urban Art & Antiques

In the history of still life paintings, the genre has always been more than the sum of its parts. In the golden age of Dutch paintings, earthly pleasure is in full bloom, but only ephemeral. Cezanne would direct us into the sensation of his objects rather than to the objects themselves. Even in America, the rise of Fall River School fruit paintings seemed to play a catch-up game with the opulent life of the Gilded Age.

Laura Burke’s new exhibition “The Unseelie Court” at Chefas Projects follows that tradition. Here the florals not only take the center stage, but also take up the world that is mostly dreamy but sometimes psychedelic. Breaking through a notion of “still,” they spring up and dangle down like figures. They intertwine to engage with each other, in a conversation we can’t yet decipher. 

In Role Reversal II, a flower, in the form of a sitter, looks toward a large vase describing stories of men, like reading a graphic novel. Tiny dandelions barely peek out of the top of the vase. It was Tarsila do Amaral in the 1920s who offered a radical departure in Brazilian art and brought anthropomorphism into modern art. But Burke isn’t interested in a singular composition. In her floral world, nature has its own rhythms – they would sing in unison as much as argue back-and-forth. The real world, including the humanized landscape, recedes into the background. This motif, like reversing the roles between civilization and nature, holds the exhibition together.

Laura is a native of Portland and currently lives in Brooklyn, New York. It is the removal from the evergreen Pacific Northwest that pushes her toward flowers and plants. “Do you know that research shows that plants can dream?” she asked me. In the diptych painting Nighttime at the Swamp, those plants are more than capable of dreaming. They are like a gang of night-owls engaging in mischievous conversation. On the horizon, we see cars and houses – intervention by humans, that remains in the periphery.

When I asked the artist if she is familiar with Paul Wonner’s work, she shook her head – no. Like Wonner, Burke exploits exuberant colors and strong contrast to heighten a sharpened sense of other worlds. She also explores the intimate relationship within the objects by hoarding them within a very narrow range of depth. Perhaps she recognized the similarity so that she quickly took a snapshot from my phone of Wonner’s Dutch flower painting from the Whitney Museum.

But the similarity stops here. While Wonner uses the meticulous precision and spatial perspective to create drama and tension, Burke opts for a more fluid and naïve approach: Her brushstrokes are loose and lush. And she flattens the space to enable a multi-faceted story-telling.

In Fairy Circle, a group of flowers gather around a table, with a variety of gestures, like all walks of life. Against the wall, a flat-screen television appears almost like a collage. The TV features another flower story, like a painting within a painting. I am wondering, are they talking about their life in another life?

The Unseelie Court is on View at Chefas Projects until October 26, 2024. 

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