JANE BURTON – A Phantom Lover
9 April – 2 May 2020, Now Online – View Exhibition
She is a collection of concavities and convexities. The cutaway of her waist, the languor of her wrist, and even the tiny curvature of her inner elbow—these are the fragmentary details of a delectable erotic repertoire. Her light skin is veiled in a gossamer mantilla. Her eyes are modestly downcast but, the dark nipple that nudges the border of her veil is hard and pert: light-and-shadow-light-and-shadow.
Photography has, since its inception, also permitted an inner vision, fully supplemented by the imagination, the mind’s eye. In the English-speaking world, the Surrealists’ exploitation of the supplementary power of the photographic medium were roundly explored by theorists like Rosalind Krauss and Hal Foster in the 1980’s and 90’s, by drawing upon Freudian and Lacanian conceptions of the unconscious.
Jane Burton continues to mark out territory in this field, time and again throwing up what Krauss once referred to as a ‘vexing question of style’, because there is no formulation that can easily define what constitutes surrealism, except perhaps a determination to chase the contents of the unconscious: shadow.
Jane Burton has been operating in this complicated realm of pleasure and fantasy, with a measure of realism, for nearly thirty years, in a pursuit of the photographic medium that tilts between narrative and abstraction, and veers between romanticism and violence. In the current body of work, the same tensions arise, due to the strange equivalence that has been struck between the figurative and non-figurative elements, in a marriage of opposites.
Extracts are from the essay, Jane Burton: A Phantom Lover by Maria Kunda.
