Brigette Burns makes deft figure drawings inspired by illustrations from 1950s books and magazines on two-inch-square paint chips. She then assembles the chips into oddly shaped agglomerations of figures in combination with square and rectangular panels reminiscent of board games, comic strips, and crossword puzzles.

Burns's recent series turns toward the personal, as signaled by the Proustian title of the show (and one of the works), "For a Long Time I Would Go to Bed Early." The playful absurdity and zingy palette of her earlier work have come together in studies of immobile figures mood-lit in restrained shades of blue, brown, and beige. She also included vague landscapes, a new motif, and excised the names of the paint colors on the chips, which she formerly incorporated.

The results are both imaginitive and visually engaging. Using compositional devices that call to mind artists ranging from Jasper Johns and James Rosenquist to David Salle, Burns manages to keep the eye moving laterally and the mind moving in and out of perspective. When you focus on the figures, the panels become background; when you look at the panels, the characters look more like figure studies. The figurative and abstract elements never correlate. Rather, in what might be called "ranch-style Cubism," we see multiple views of suburban subject matter, arranged in sprawling lateral fashion.

Figures are split, repeated, and rotated, with the resulting fragments and dislocations suggesting human frailty. Burns has laudibly upped the ante and pushed on into a kind of emotional terra incognita.

DeWitt Cheng
ARTnews magazine, October 2004, p. 193