David Burkhardt

At the heart of my artistic practice is the concept of the invisible and the questioning of its manifest form. I seek ways to articulate this realm, this place of apparent formlessness, that which constantly eludes us yet remains present, anticipated, that which haunts us, without losing its defining and essential quality, which I consider to be its indispensable inaccessibility.

I consciously use painting as a medium which has always existed within a tension between revelation and concealment; a medium which deals at its very core with the idea of revealing by hiding and hiding by revealing. Painting means masking, and masking is a way of showing. A painting silently presents its own secret by offering us a gaze into our own twofold perception; it works as a gateway into a world both material and immaterial.

The invisible is always given. It has a form and a content. When something is invisible, its not the absence itself which I register, but rather the presence of something else veiling my sight. I assume a seamless reality and I notice missing parts. Not all dots connect. There is always a remnant keeping me from receiving an uninterrupted totality. Gradually, as my gaze wanders, a second reality presents itself; a layer on top of my initial sight: a structure, a pattern, an ongoing lichen.

Considering both of these realities, I connect space and surface as the two essential states of representation and perception. Both are mutually dependent on each other: the shell is dependent on its invisible core, the structure on the chaos that preceded it, the clearly defined word on nature’s unbridled growth.