The tension between utilitarian purpose and artistic inspiration is the unexpectedly compelling strength of David Burdeny’s mesmerizing series of aerial abstractions called Salt. His large-format and luminously intriguing photographs of salterns occupy the hazy border zone between the prosaic and the poetic. In our hyper-connected age of GPS, Google maps and instant information, the instinctual reaction to these scenes might first be to determine the where and the why of them -their ground-level location or biological/environmental fact. To see first the service roads and draining ditches or to puzzle out how the chemical balance in the salt ponds creates these particular blooms of colour. Such readings serve to root vision in the commonplace and the established order -the here and now -and downgrade the sublimity in the aerial experience. But Burdeny’s Salt photographs aim to be more evocative and exalted than pedestrian. They seek to elevate our experience of the world in more ways than one.

With Burdeny’s Salt series, once you let go of the map, you take hold of the opportunity in the work. Then the immensity of the view, the expressive power of light and colour, and complex feelings of solitude and release take over, take flight. Burdeny manages to render into visual form the ineffable experience of drifting, of floating above it all, of being lost out beyond the humanly order of things (a clever conceit given how humans have definitely ordered these working salt fields). In some of the images -such as Saltern Study 15 -there is the sense of the transfigurative potential of expansion, a longing for the infinite. Whereas Red Water, Hut Lagoon reveals the awesome beauty of the abyss as a roiled cauldron of red. In their abstracted glory, Burdeny’s images play to the psyche and have powerful emotional force.
What Salt adds to this conversation is its cunning use of the artistic heritage and sublime intrigue of abstract art to further Burdeny’s interest in liminal spaces. In their use of amorphous shapes, elongated fields of colour and vertical, jagged and sinuous lines, Burdeny’s images suggest the painterly expressiveness of Rothko, Still, Newman, Diebenkorn and late-career Willem de Kooning. The effect is less intentional than it is available -Modernism’s abstracted reordering of the visual landscape (which essentially got going in pre-WWI Paris with Robert Delaunay and his aerial scenes of the Eiffel Tower) permits a non-objective reading of these compositions. But why bother? What do we gain by seeing landscape as a non-objective experience of colour as an “instrument” (as Rothko termed it) to explore subconscious emotions? In his 1948 essay, The Sublime is Now, Barnett Newman provided the essential answer -” the image we produce is the self-evident one of revelation”. And that power of personal revelation remains an active concern in contemporary art. A recent 3-year scholarly survey by the Tate revealed how actively engaged is the field of artists presenting new ways to consider the sublime and the potential for “immanent transcendence,...a transformative experience”.