Steve Burden
RCA Super Satellite | London | February / March 2025
RCA Super Satellite | London | February / March 2025
Exhibition Review by Kate Reeve Edwards
Steve Burden, Morphine, 2025, Oil and acrylic on paper. 20 x 15cm. Private collection.
Each painting in Morpheus is a portal to hallucination. Oversaturated, strange, humorous, terrifying, these pieces track the peaks and furrows of euphoria and fear. It offers you a view through a curtain of fugue, into a space of drift and aloneness.
This exhibition was created in the aftermath of a broken neck caused by a bike accident Burden had last May. In a brace and on a cocktail of opioids to manage the pain, the artist experienced an extended period of drug-time. These months are categorised by memories of soaring euphoria and deep, disturbed nightmares; of visions of an alter ego and plunging, echoing isolation. It was a time where he was trapped inside his own head, wandering around the halls of his subconscious: surprised and terrified by what he found there. This exhibition tracks these experiences and visions.
Steve Burden, Horse, 2025, Oil and acrylic on canvas, clad in red frosted perspex. 51 x 41cm
Whereas Burden’s usual oeuvre is lovingly filled with allegory and narrative, this show is much more visceral. Apart from the occasional references to Morpheus and the two horse paintings (horse as another name for heroin, because it has ‘one hell of a kick’), these paintings are vulnerable, raw, unburdened with layers of meaning. All self-portraits of one form or another, they lay bare the liminal, lonely space experienced in this dreamtime.
When exploring this chemical voyage into the self-conscious, laid out in the white-walled and industrial basement of the RCA Super Satellite gallery, I am drawn to five paintings in particular. All are collage and oil paint self-portraits, using the same image of Burden, one arm across his chest, collar of his paint-spattered boiler suit turned up. The same composition: portrait with painted mask, figured in five different ways, like an amalgamation between the pop-art of Warhol and the fleshy ooze of Bacon: gruesome, bold and alight with energy. Their titles are named after each of the drugs he was taking, Amitriptyline, Naproxen, Tramadol, Zopiclone and Morphine.
Steve Burden, House of Cards, 2025, Oil and acrylic on canvas. 180 x 165 cm
These were, Burden tells me, the five paintings he made whilst on the named opioids.
‘I had always been fascinated by writers and artists who were addicted to heroin or laudanum but still managed to create, like Arthur Conan Doyle, William S. Burroughs and Charles Dickens. I wanted to experience what they experienced, to know what it felt like.’
‘I had always been fascinated by writers and artists who were addicted to heroin or laudanum but still managed to create, like Arthur Conan Doyle, William S. Burroughs and Charles Dickens. I wanted to experience what they experienced, to know what it felt like.’
Forcing himself into the studio, he began with collage. ‘As I had this nerve damage in my hands left over from the accident, I started out with collage to test my motor skills.’ This began an intuitive conversation with the pieces. ‘I had to fight the instinct to be dormant, as the drugs make you closed off and lethargic. I worked really quickly and automatically.
I knew exactly what I wanted to do, so I just did it, without overthinking.’
I knew exactly what I wanted to do, so I just did it, without overthinking.’
The pieces are direct, the composition resolute. The mask of fleshy paint, daubed on with impasto abundance in colours of meat and chemicals, uncooked pinks and shining violets, rather than disturb or frighten, reveal the fragility of the figure. The mask encases the expressive face beneath, shutting the mouth and restricting movement. Burden’s relationship to reality through the drug-time was viewed through a kind of cocoon: ‘I’m such a tactile and hands-on partner and father and I couldn’t do that anymore. There was an exclusion zone around me because my kids were worried about hurting me. I was fragile physically and the drugs kind of dulled my emotions. For the first two weeks, I was mute and I slept most of the time. I wasn’t hungry so I didn’t eat with my family; the daily rite of the family dinner table was something I couldn’t access.’ He was removed from the family unit, the drugs pushing him to the periphery.
Steve Burden, Horse, 2025, Oil and acrylic on canvas, clad in red frosted perspex. 51 x 41cm
The mask is a motif of this exhibition and of Burden’s work generally. For him it has been a symbol of the masks we wear beyond the boundary of the home, a symbol of the moulded, polite or protective forms of ourselves we wear to face the outside world. In this exhibition, he discovered a new mask: the mask of his alter ego, the cloaked figure visiting him in dreams and nightmares, leading him through his subconscious like a twisted Virgil to his drugged Dante. The masked self became the only self, the emotional, connected, raw kernel of humanness trapped behind a chemical wall, walking the antechambers of his own mind.
This exhibition, for me, brought into sharp relief the fact that connection, touch and interface with others is the source of light and reality. To live inside one’s own mind, for whatever reason, is a condition which breeds introspective nightmares.