Tom Birkner’s paintings are compelling images of a world that is everywhere and nowhere, the world of the American rust belt, of dying mining towns, and of the people that inhabit them. This is subject matter rarely dealt with in art today, and is presented without the nostalgia or sentimentality that might be expected. These paintings are cool observations of somewhat unsettling situations and locales where that which sociologists call anomie reigns. Peopled with alienated adolescents either aimlessly standing around before decaying building facades or furtively seeking cheap thrills in abandoned factories, these paintings bring to mind the dystopian visions of David Lynch films, the movie “River’s Edge”, and the stories of Raymond Carver, which have shown us the continental drift of a downwardly mobile sub-class inhabiting a good many places between the coasts of an almost invisible America.
However, there is no agenda, in the social-realist sense of ‘30’s painting, intended in Birkner’s work. These paintings are not “calls to arms”. They are, in fact, to a certain degree, perverse celebrations of a life shorn of glamour, arrested in states of near despair yet persevering in the small pleasures afforded the poor, and of a certain freedom that comes with being left out of the orderly affairs that command the daily lives of the cadre of middle-class workers that fill our suburbs. This is not to say that Birkner’s paintings romanticize the down and out, but rather that they force us to examine our own take on questions regarding class, as well as the presumptions that insulate us from the reality of such places as the towns and hamlets of Birkner’s lost world.
The vision of industrial America that Tom Birkner has brought to canvas has been conveyed with consummate technical ability. Birkner is intrigued by the conventions of pictorial representation, examining and using techniques derived from the tradition of painting in a fresh and powerful way. His paintings are ontological researches into the problem of “being in the world”, placing the viewing subject in a space that is a protention of time, an enveloping moment where the gaze is arrested within the material stuff of paint and its designata. Plunging perspectival motifs fix our attention within the narrative traps of these scenes, where “nothing” is happening, nut with great import. Looking at everybody from Courbet to Warhol, Richter, and Tansey, Birkner takes what he needs and uses painterly gambits to achieve his own ends. This demonstration that historical tropes of painting can be studied and used by the painter of today, breaches any reductivist historical model that puts such investigations out of play, and is a heartening forecast that “the death of painting” may be deferred for a good time longer.