Ron Burkhardt merges language with art in his large-scale abstract paintings.  He pioneered the Notism movement—sometimes described as an evolution of art brut, recalling the obsessive œuvres of Joan Miró, Paul Klee, Cy Twombly and Jean Dubuffet. 

 

Art critic and curator Peter Frank said of Burkhardt's recent work, "Notism is neither a whole nor a sum of parts; it is an exploration of how one can become the other, in either direction – how a collection of parts can be fused into a whole, and how our regard for that whole can be a matter of zooming in and out of those parts, looking at the same time for information, no matter how trivial, and the sheer thrill of the line, no matter how tiny. Burkhardt’s real struggle is always against entropy; but the notist artworks never fall back apart, neither flaking off the wall nor melting conceptually into the telephone-pad yammerings they once were. Burkhardt won’t let them – and neither, finally, will our eyes."