It should go without saying there are different ways to accomplish art’s essential business, that artists go about the problem with different goals and different instruments, each according to their circumstance. My own experience of the world seems to be a compulsion to summarize and characterize what has happened to me verbally and to make pictures using paper and glue to illustrate the words in my head. The artist Charles Burrus, whose latest work is at Muse Gallery during July, 2014, explores experience as a landscape or starscape of light and color, without fussing too much over the verbiage or composing a narrative. Lately, he has produced fine pieces in encaustic, the medium of colored wax.

I have followed Charles Burrus’ work for several years, and “what the medium will do” is a matter of great importance to him. His curiosity is nearly scientific. He has made previously dense works in oil paint incorporating different kinds of paper and foil which were large-scale explorations of how much light can be emitted from a thick application of dark matter. His latest work in encaustic is much brighter, less abstract, and yields much more detail in a scaled-down space. The pleasure of physically working the wax and blending the pigments comes through in the gaiety of the colors, lusciousness of forms, and the sheer delight Mr. Burrus takes from achieving a compositional semblance of tropical fauna (Parrots) or a celestial swirl, and making that likeness in a foreign medium.

The recent encaustic paintings of Mr. Burrus often refer to a visual image, but his use of the materials delightfully and serendipitously abstracts the original. He is an artist who desires collaboration with chance because he believes that by letting go of conscious intent, a connection to the grand scheme of the universe will happen. It’s the same mystic impulse that justifies casting a spread of tarot cards to learn about some present person, or consulting star charts to coordinate what happens in the firmament with circumstances here below. In Galaxy Hub, Mr. Burrus literally imposes a bicycle sprocket on a nebulous gray swirl, expressing the central belief that informs all his work to this point: that there is a plan or mechanism unfolding in the seeming chaos of history. He has used bicycle parts in previous oils bearing titles referring to mythology. The particular reference is never very explicit; it conveys a general feeling that the cosmos conforms to a godly will compatible with human understanding.

Some of the most detailed and pictorial work in the current Muse Gallery show generates from images of the night sky. In A Wrinkle in Time, a man-made (or at least earthly) construction in triangular form with a swirling patchwork of colors is positioned in the foreground of a yellow and purple, glowing galaxy churning in the cosmically distant background. Or maybe it doesn’t! It doesn’t matter: the picture relates to a classic childhood book in which the vast loneliness of space is vanquished by human understanding. Similarly, Mr. Burrus exploring the physicality of wax and pigment squeezed through a heat gun to see what pictures alchemy creates expresses a faith that human consciousness can make something of what is essentially unsympathetic and inanimate matter.

The titles and associations in Mr. Burrus’ work are playful as opposed to being prescriptive, so I think he’s not trying to convey particular traits or characteristics in the pair of works entitled Thelma and Louise. On the other hand, the reference tells us something about what the artist is trying to get across. The pair are similar to one another compositionally, but the colors are different, creating the effect of a photo and its negative; thus, a generic pairing is established, but on the other hand he’s not saying the radiant masses hurtling through a field of colored daubs is Jack and Jill. The vivid image in the eponymous film was of a definitive burst of glory happening for the moment: a Big Bang moment, final, paradoxically deterministic, but creative and expressive, too. Thelma and Louise refused to accept a world where choice was limited, fate was fixed, and feeling was stifled, so they exploded like fireworks in the sky. It’s a lovely emblem for the spirit that Mr. Burrus conveys in his output of recent encaustics, a sensibility trained to the temporary fulfillment of light and energy and a refusal to bow to the darkness.