“Everything is like something. What is this like?” The “this” in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s question refers, of course, to the question itself. Thus, the philosopher elevates, and at the same time problematizes issues of originality and repetition, representation and abstraction, as they occur in the realm of language. So too with the artworks of Bob Burchman, Ron Griffin and Peter Sims, which together comprise the upcoming exhibition “Abstraction in Reverse: Three artists working at the intersection of representation and the abstract tradition” at Cardwell Jimmerson Contemporary Art in Culver City. Burchman, Griffin and Sims share little in the way of painterly technique or pictorial vocabulary. The interpretive link is their common focus on that barely liminal space between so-called “abstraction” and so-called “representation,” the two master-narratives that have come to organize and define the entire discourse of painting over the last hundred years. As unsatisfied with such black-and-white binary distinctions as they are with the false-compromise language of “semi-abstraction,” these three artists examine the age-old abstraction / representation debate yet more closely. The fascinating levels of ambiguity and paradox they discover at that intersection where putative opposites co-mingle is the motor powering this seemingly diverse but oddly unified three-person exhibition.

Bob Burchman is, to all appearances, a latter-day photo-realist painter. Precisely as advertised, he employs the full range of photo-realist imagery, including representations of reflections on glass of the sort once used to assert the commercial nature of modern reality. But rather than directing our attention to the ubiquitous storefront window filled with goods for sale (and with shoppers seen there in reflection), as did a generation of photo-realists before him, Burchman here depicts other artworks on view in private homes
and public museums. These highly recognizable paintings and prints are protected within plexiglass boxes that themselves “reflect” their physical environments, including the architecture, viewers and even surrounding artworks, all of which this painter meticulously registers in his own paintings. Thus, Burchman takes the abstraction / representation dialectic—common to all three artists in this show—and further complicates it by reference to the social context in which art is owned, presented and received.

However inexplicable the forms and shapes that appear in the artworks of Ron  Griffin—imagery that might well be judged “abstract” or “non-objective”—all have proximate cause in the physical world. In one example, translucent white wax paper toilet-seat protectors are folded into “meaningful” shapes that are then carefully reproduced on top of what appears to be a black and white chess board. Griffin’s chess board imagery invokes the paintings of Jasper Johns—in particular Johns’ scale-less “representations” of flags, targets and maps—but its deeper source is certainly Marcel Duchamp. No faint-hearted semi-abstractionist nor nostalgic humanist, Duchamp was famously skeptical of abstract art insisting, even amidst the triumph of American Abstract Expressionism, that such strategies were “boring.” Like Duchamp, Griffin’s paintings and book-like objects avoid the charge of boredom by sometimes making small and discrete reference to illicit sexuality (if not, indeed, criminality),thus picking up a sometimes overlooked thread leading back to the origins of Modernism where the abstraction / representation debate began.

Of these three artists, Peter Sims is the most easily identifiable as an “abstract painter,” and yet this too would constitute a category mistake. Indeed, of the three, Sims’ artworks most closely embody the radical insight first attributed to Peter Halley in the 1980’s—that abstraction and representation are each built one into the other and are thus coextensive—a view which has since been so fully absorbed into the painting discourse that it has been effectively forgotten. In the spirit of Halley and his followers, Sims makes what pass for abstract paintings out of sometimes obscure source-material, in one case the fragment of a Bauhaus fabric, and in another a tiny illustration—blown up much larger—of an early 20th century children’s developmental game. Both physically and conceptually, Sims’ provocative artworks differ dramatically one from the next. Pushing beyond Halley, this artist abandons what might be the last advantage offered by abstract painting: its stable and predictable status as a genre where all terms are agreed upon in advance. Sims instead begins every new painting fresh, as if there were no precedent upon which to build, thus putting the very issue of “genre” into question.

Familiar territory? Yes, and so be it. The work of Bob Burchman, Ron Griffin and Peter Sims in “Abstraction in Reverse: Three artists working at the intersection of representation and the abstract tradition” at Cardwell Jimmerson Contemporary Art argues that the abstraction / representation dialectic is never resolved and yet always pressing.