• By MICHAEL S. BELL
• VISIONS Art Quarterly, Los Angeles, CA

Well hidden in the timeless landscape near Four Corners in the Southwest is a sacred place named, doubtless by settlers, "Newspaper Rock". This massive tableau bears images made primarily by Native Americans over the centuries, with occasional graffiti added by Anglo passers-by in more recent times. In utter silence the pictures talk of adventures, dramas, relationships and history in vivid contrast to the ancient stone upon which they are drawn. It is in this manner that the painter Bruce Burris works on more transitory surfaces, giving witness to the humane, sensitive and most intense revelations of our time.

Burris is mainly concerned with people, not necessarily in a representational or figurative sense, but rather in terms of how we behave with one another and within ourselves. This concern is expressed in the form of written words laid over arcane and obvious semiotic public symbols as well as stark abstract fields of color which, orchestrated all together, present an intense mosaic that will likely disturb the formalist preference for simplistic spaces and "cubist" color. His paintings are stories which can be read from front to back, right to left, top to bottom, side to side, left to right, back to front or any which way the eye and mind determines would be best. But this work cannot be regarded as journalism or genre painting for it slouches toward commentary, poignancy and satire, provoking awareness of emotions we strive to ignore and forget.

Burris' art is a gentle evangelism, and it asks you to devote some time to the reading. The prismatic color and pattern painting he employs remind one of both aboriginal techniques and the relentless bellow of television/billboard advertising. It is as if Burris is an explorer out in the dark and the cold, looking for that which is both obvious and denied, the wasted lives, the highest attainments of the purest souls, the flotsam of a warehouse society, the tragedies lying in their fluids, the unspoken deepest forms of love and hatred, that which we mean when we say something else and much more.