Collage image of Burant meditating against a backdrop of his Buddhist and Jungian-themed artwork.
The new documentary, X-An Artful Life, opens with Christopher X Burant ritualistically painting a black X on a huge canvas in his garden. Burant doesn’t stop the paint from dripping or clean the splatters from the surrounding white space. What’s left is a zoomed-in, messy signature.
That sequence sets up Burant, a longtime Madisonian and owner of Red Pine Coop (for those in the know, it’s the one with the sauna), as a typical late-century postmodern painter, self-referential and imperfect. But then the viewer experiences a barrage of the septuagenarian’s massive collection of drawings, collages, sculptures, postcards and watercolors. The deluge of images shows how long Burant has been working on and thinking about art.
“Christopher goes to his studio and does art just about every day and has been doing that for over 50 years,” says Martin Saunders, the film’s director and a friend of Burant.
Saunders, who recently retired from the mental health field, found Burant to be the perfect subject for a film.
“I’ve always been an avid photographer. It struck me that I could make a movie about this very interesting character and feature the prolific nature of his art,” Saunders says.
Burant has no problem jumping between realistic naturalism one day — painting a pretty trout in a stream — and surrealist collages the next, gluing dismembered heads beside literary quotes. Other pieces are weirder still, like a cabinet that always spills its contents.
“Art is unique and sublime expressions of the infinite brought into the temporal,” Burant says in the movie, boiling down his wide-ranging practice into one philosophy.
Some of the film’s most charming moments are when Burant sifts through piles of his old papers, surprising himself with what he finds.
Perhaps the defining through line in his work is his interpretation of Theravada Buddhism, which he dove into after shrugging off a Catholic upbringing. Burant’s art is often designed to encourage others to explore meditation.
Burant avoided showing his works publicly until a 2018 show at Common Wealth Gallery. This event quietly crowns the film, as art viewers sit peacefully with their eyes closed beneath his pendulums, or spend minutes gazing at his images.
With little else in the hour-long documentary aside from the man, his home and his work, Saunders’ film is itself a rather peaceful meditation, ruminating on the infinite possibilities of one human lucky enough to give everything to art.
X-An Artful Life will have a free premiere screening at 2:30 p.m. on June 1 at Union South’s Marquee Theater.
