Before the wretched Dionysian night shone a poet of the crumbling concrete, a thumper of the Book who threw away the text and made viscera sing in chromatic harmony and Metaxa-soaked syncopation. Then out of deepest longing emerged a polar sun circling a river of metallic oxides with the night overhead.\ \ David B. Smith Gallery is proud to present Song Cycle, a solo exhibition by Chicago, IL-based artist Robert Burnier. \ \ About this new body of work Burnier writes:\ \ Song Cycle is made in reference to a summer of deep listening to Marvin Gaye\'s musical ouvre, studying its complex histories and manifestations. A freedom and beauty of expression; a quest to bring a unity to a divided body and mind, or their near inversion.\ \ The folded and compressed forms of the works in this exhibition retain a history of their own becoming -- the colors in ancient African, Mediterranean and Mesopotamian objects yield inspiration. But the work has its demands, as do I, a communion of what is within and without, to understand this sovereignty, this being. For the past might be as different from now as we expect of the future, and we are the arch on the shifting ground between.\ \ Presented in the main gallery, Song Cycle features ten new wall sculptures. Made of skillfully manipulated metal sheets, rhythm and meter synthetically bond with color and form in seemingly weightless forms tumbling across open space. There is an unmistakable lyricism to his works, an innate vocabulary of carefully crimped edges and billowy folds that harness both mystery and recognition. \ \ Burnier’s unique process creates space for contemplation and metaphor. Starting with a flat plane, the metal that comprises each work begins with a defined linearity. Through a process of intuitive bending works become themselves as the void between spaces is compressed and folded onto itself. Like revolutions of a spinning record, the earliest marks may bend back to meet the last, as the past and present mingle t