For San Francisco-based artist, Todd Bura, hard-edge minimalism is dead. Though this may have been true for art in general since Frank Stella hung up his palette and galloped into the white cube in the sky, Bura had to work through a geometric history (as he did in his last exhibition at Triple Base) before setting off into a more delightfully unsteady territory of bent lines, whimsical mark-making and playful polka dots.

Bura's second solo exhibition at Triple Base, Painting Spiritual Painting, took on more color and movement than last year's solo exhibition, Misfits, also at Triple Base. Painting Spiritual Painting makes a grand gesture to present a case for a universalist continuity, providing that one knows that all of Bura's paintings equate or point to a visual inequality. Bura's work is primarily concerned with parts and processes that are intricately aided by his emotional accounting. Essentially, in Bura's work, all balances are off, segmentations are freehanded and the sense of pure addition and subtraction of visual markers hold no perfected code or sure methodology other than Bura's momentary emotional state. This is the blueprint which Bura follows in the majority of his pieces.

Every piece in Painting Spiritual Painting, for example, is titled 'Your Painting' giving the show an underlining theme of interconnectivity.

Bura also works to transcend the hard geometrics of Misfits'with the addition of waves and circles, further mimicking the spiritual dimension of painting itself. The purity of abstraction is undercut by the colorful beginnings of recognizable emblems. Sourcing a reductive strain of abstraction coupled with an emblematic revivalism, Bura's paintings work hand-in-hand with a sense of the collective unconscious minus the deeper emphasis on spirituality.

Abstraction is dead, long live abstraction.

- Petra Royale Bibeau

Images couresy the artist and Triple Base: Your Painting, 2009, oil paint, canvas, 14 3/4’’ x 16 1/4’’, Your Painting, 2009, oil paint, linen, 14 3/8’’ x 16 5/8’’