To both the elect and the electorate, who are jaded by the pro I iteration of novelties in 20th-century art, it is a cul­tural hardship to be a good follower and not a popularizer. Burkhardt’s por­tion is the bottom crust because his talent for assimilating and complement­ing Gorky’s achievements in loose-field symbolist painting, can be appreciated only by those who see a painting in front of them, not an object for classi­fication. Limbo expresses aggressive futility in girder, wrench, and key shapes clamped into shackling adjacency with­in slithery paint handling. The color transitions: greys skirting yellow-orange and blue, are paced to sensualize wait­ing (like exhaust from a small town bus terminal). Burkhardt has the gift of knowing how to understand; if his works do not achieve the privileges of temperament, they usually earn the rights of labor.

—Rosalind G. Wholden