• By BRUCE RICHARDSON
• THE CASPER STAR TRIBUNE, CASPER WYOMING, JANUARY 30 1994

The show of works by Bruce Burris. which opened recently at the Nicolaysen, includes large loud acrylics and small, quiet pattern drawings. The art is compelling and well worth your attention.

The acrylics command our participation, full of urban energy, these colorful canvases are crammed side to side with texts, objects, figures. In them we hear a multitude of voices and feel the excitement of a crowded street in San Francisco where they were painted.

They remind us of graffiti-covered walls where the shape of the words has its own energy or bright murals created by community artists. Burris is part of the flourishing "outsider" art which really exploded in the 1970s and made its way into the galleries in the I980s.

We might also connect Burris to the dense flow of texts -- banal, funny, provocative -- that Jenny Holzer uses, or the homage to comic books by Roy Lichtenstein. All share ah eclectic, pop spirit, where everything in the culture can be appropriated for art.

''Nonetheless. while Lichtenstein is cool and ironic, Hotter and Burris are explosively political. Burris's work, though, is nicer and more inviting than the confrontational or the angry graffiti artists.

His politics, though rather sweet, are not naive. Burris reports that his "subjects are people nobody wants to know about, who have nothing and expect nothing." Their voices, contained in cartoon-like balloons, tell tales of addiction, death, aging and suffering experienced by the people of San Francisco's Tenderloin, where Burris worked in social service agencies. "I'm twelve and drunk" reads one text in "1989/90."

Advertising logos scattered about and a television at the center present the inevitable connection between commodity capitalism. which lives on consumption, and addiction.

The result is the destruction of the body seen in the figure below, but also a sense of hope. The sexually mixed figures that frame the painting show the power of the individual to create art and not just repeat ad slogans. Coming from their eyes are moments of beauty -- an observed butterfly -- and a painting done by street people.

Similarly, ''She Said This'' shows "my perfect sky" and "my perfect ocean'' emerging from an eye. in contrast, at the bottom is the horrific story of the death of an unborn and the voices crying out from a series of tottering hotels. Burris says these living spaces for the San Francisco poor had plenty of vitality, but were also death traps and houses of pain.

"Make your own history,'' the most complex of these acrylics. continues the social commentary, while focusing on the role of perception and action in creating reality. On the right are a mix of those odd advertisements from old comic books ("Mini Spy Cam," "Magic card deck. You win every time.") which are both fun and ominous in their implications.

Flanking them is the outline of a multibeast form making an through movies. crying through a trumpet ("Listen to us'') and voicing odd, powerful statements about diseases ("His arthritis is not for sale,'' "Our high blood pressure is an ice-flow").

This energetic chaos takes some shape on the right. Oil, coal and development projects yield pollution and death. The wheel of fortune here suggests we have some choice: at least we can spin it.

I predict that this section and not the sexual imagery that agitate many local viewers. Bruce Burris is certainly no poster boy for the Heritage Society.

I have greatly oversimplified these rich, contradictory designs. They ask to be mad and you might as well do it yourself. As Burris puts it on one of the paintings: "Dear viewer, you are gentle and kind. Put your own ideas here."

Simpler and calmer are his small works. Burris calls them "Shaker Drawings," partly because of their lovely patterns and their invitation to quiet meditation. They are constructed of simple phrases (for example. "This belongs to all of us") written over and over with one of the world's finest pens. I had trouble reading these, even with a magnifying glass.

Burris thinks of these as having the relaxing effect of a mantra, some simple phrase repeated over and over. The designs induce a tranquil inner peace, welcome after the exhausting energy of the acrylics.

Though he can be defined in terms of successful modernist artists, Burris is really simpler and more original than that. He lives plainly and does art to express the shape and form of his rich life -- which has included a year in Prague and now time in Lexington

Like other outsider political artists, he listens to the street and translates its pain, beauty and energy into rousing visual form. After a run of appealing, but somewhat dull shows at the Nic, Burris adds some zip. You may not find this beautiful, but you won't be bored.