Before launching into a description of this particular painter’s work, I’d like to offer a caveat about art criticism in general. Readers who have followed some of my earlier posts in this thread may know by now that I do not present myself in them as a critic of anything other than the culture at large, and the institutional biases and habits of the world and the marketplace of art within it. But as a lifelong painter, I rarely set out to criticize the individual artists working within that wider milieu. Many years ago, in my first forays into writing about such things, I did loose some broadsides at a handful of painters to whose work I took exception, but I never felt good about doing that. The life we makers live is challenging enough without having to suffer the insults of critics, most of whom do not share in our direct experience of it. Why then should I — as a person who knows exactly what it means to live this life — add my own insults to the already abundant injuries it poses? Instead, I leave the works I do not care for alone and write about those I admire from the perspective of another maker. My goal then is never to tell the reader what to like or dislike, or what to value or revile, but to point instead to those qualities which my own practical knowledge and experience enables me to see in the works my fellow makers have created.

I first encountered Tom Birkner’s paintings when we were in a three-person show together in Santa Fe a little over a decade ago. He was living in California at the time, having come originally from New Jersey. Soon after that he settled in El Paso, Texas where he’s been living and teaching ever since. I’d made a similar series of cross-continental peregrinations and sojourns in my twenties and thirties some years before, so we had that history in common, along with a kindred vein of humorous northeastern irascibility that sometimes collides with the mellow affect of the American West. Tom feels and expresses himself like the tradesmen I grew up and worked with in New England and New York, over whose workaday personae an overarching temperament of “Can you believe this shit?” seems always to preside.

And that, in a sense, is the very question woven throughout Birkner’s work. It is a question he appears to be asking both about the worlds he paints, and which the people inhabiting those worlds also seem to be asking of their own surroundings. Birkner is a realist to his core, not only in that he paints representational scenes in exacting, sometimes near-photographic detail, but also in his dedication to an acutely critical vision of cultural realities that we college-educated liberal artist types (and indeed the whole privileged class to which we belong) have been trained to look away from over the past few decades.

To put it bluntly: Tom paints “flyover country.” In the age of Trump and MAGA he is to that segment of the populace who were traditionally labelled “Poor White Trash” as Pieter Bruegal the Elder was to the peasants, farmers and other laborers of the Northern European Renaissance. By casting his clear and ever skeptical eye in that direction, he challenges us to look with him at a reality that is far more nuanced, complex, intelligent, diverse and human than we would like to believe, especially as Trump and his clown car of autocratic sycophants, religious fanatics and Mafia-style political capos are now giddily burning American Democracy, and the wellbeing of their own base of supporters with it, to the ground.

But however clearly Birkner looks in that direction, it feels as if simply looking, and reflecting what he sees there, are mainly what he is interested in doing. I sense no hectoring political polemic in his view, no contorted conceptual agenda of correctness. His overriding message, like that of Goya’s documentary etchings from an earlier and equally fraught political age, may reside in one of that artists’ most famous captions:

“I saw this.”

The other important and partnered theme of Birkner’s work, at least to this viewer, is his craft. The guy draws and paints beautifully, especially so in more recent works like the diptych of near identical scenes from 2022 titled Living Room Set and Fridge respectively, or in 2025’s Revelers, in High and Low and in my favorite, which forms the alter-like centerpiece of this exhibition, the big 2025 State Capitol (Paperless Society).

This large canvas on board (it measures a little under eight feet wide), shows the exposed interior of an office tower undergoing demolition with a flurry of paper detritus, like ticker-tape, suspended in the air around it. On one of the highest floors two figures, possibly a father and teenaged daughter, stand and wave, with a large desk tumbling through the air a floor or two below them as if they had just pushed it off the edge. The detail rendered in these pieces can be awe-inspiring, but it is also inviting, familiar and often quite funny. I visited Tom at the gallery prior to his opening, where he was putting some finishing touches on the pictures like Turner and Constable in their dueling varnishing day additions at London’s Royal Academy in 1831. He mentioned that there was something he wanted to put on the tee-shirt of one of the tiny figures in the office-building piece. Sure enough, when I came back on opening night there on the girl’s shirt was the microscopic pink figure of the goofy starfish Patrick from the cartoon series Sponge Bob SquarePants.

In all these later canvasses, as well as in numerous others from the past several years Birkner has homed-in on a technique that is simultaneously realistic and also extremely tactile, painterly and abstract. His clearly labored surfaces are arrived at by some method not immediately obvious, but which sometimes incorporates an underlying terrain of taped or sculpted grids over which his paint is dragged, scumbled, scraped and re-applied in new layers and glazes of colors that go miles deep. Quite apart from their strong narrative content, Birkner’s paintings are also exquisite painterly objects. And just as his stories do not lecture at us, neither does his method self-consciously show itself off, it is therefore as much of a subtle and inviting surprise as are the characters in these dramas he stages for us.

There is an embedded, self-engaged dialectic within these works that lends a great deal to their strength. One cannot decide in a single viewing exactly what has been seen. They are able to be playful, irreverent, and ominous all at once, just as they are materially both representational and abstract, both disciplined and chaotic. The office building especially puts us in this quizzical realm when we see so clearly the party-like confetti and joyful pose of the little girl on the edge of the sun-dappled edifice, even as what she seems to be celebrating is the destruction to which she has climbed at her upper-storied perch. For those of us of a certain age, the painting also cannot help but conjure a far more sinister memory in the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

And yet, Birkner is not explicitly instructing us to see that. One of the things I admire most about his pictures is that they leave room for me to make up my own mind about what he has shown me. Implicit in that latitude is the reality that there are no pat answers to the chaos of the world in which we live. It is all things, all at once.

— Christopher W Benson, April, 2025

Tom Birkner’s work is included a larger, four-person exhibition titled Stories Retold: New American Perspectives which is on view at the Gerald Peters Contemporary in Santa Fe, NM through May 31, 2025.