Seline Burn: Kairos

A bird tenderly hovers over a woman’s lips, its wings spread out in flight, resembling a speech bubble. The artist Seline Burn speaks through her paintings, the messages of which are at the heart of Kairos, her first solo exhibition in Los Angeles at Baert Gallery. Of the ten paintings in the show, five are evident as self-portraits. By bringing viewers into her world, Burn’s paintings offer intimacy; they are pure and confiding. These sentiments are accentuated through her tender depictions, of birds, for example, in various contexts: nestled against human skin, cradled in arms, resting among trees or quietly taking flight. They are always portrayed peacefully, alluding to trust and surrender: the weight of a creature’s faith, the human willingness to let go.

Kairos is an ancient Greek meaning a critical opening in time, a crisis that is also an opportunity. As opposed to Chronos, which marks linear, measurable time, Kairos is time moving vertically. C. G. Jung associated it with synchronicity, a special moment when a person is particularly open to experiencing two random events as being connected. Because of their inner state, the person perceives a meaningfully link between these events. This seemingly random coincidence gains deeper significance for them. Burn is discovering that for her the essence of painting is an escape of Chronos, to being more open, not holding back, and working from the unconscious. While a painting may feel random when it’s first started, meaning often emerges in hindsight, like an epiphany.

In Burn’s exhibition Kairos, she has captured this moment of vertical time. Her paintings illustrate those instances when an individual wavers between collapse and flight, between holding on and letting go. Susan Sontag’s poignant confession resonates: “Strength is what I want. Strength not to endure—I have that, and it has made me weak—but strength to act.” Endurance alone, these paintings suggest, can become its own burden, but there comes a moment when one must act, choose, and transform.

Held by the Sun perfectly encapsulates this concept. Here, Burn contemplates her next move on a chessboard, populated with gargoyles inspired by those of Notre Dame, recalling her time living in Paris. The ambivalence between knowing and not knowing, as she uses her instincts and knowledge to guide her, is palpable. For Seline Burn, a Swiss artist from Basel, this exhibition marks a personal threshold. Recent upheavals and new beginnings in her life have left echoes across these works. Her search for balance—between inner turmoil and calm, past identities and new selves, here and elsewhere—unfolds in layers of paint. In Ariadne’s Thread, three women carefully step along a fallen tree suspended over water, guided by a delicate thread—they could be an allegory of Burn’s own self, of her past, future, and present (with a baseball cap as the time stamp).

Burn’s palette, dominated by soft yellows and deep blues—colors of dawn and twilight—enhances the mood of liminality. Yellow radiates hope in works like Intertwined or At the Edge of the Light, while shades of deep blue introduce undertones of uncertainty and contemplation. Each painting maintains a careful tension between tranquility and unrest, holding viewers in the quiet suspension of unresolved narratives.

In the end, Kairos offers a space that is poetic and profound—a pause in which fragility becomes strength, and in which every small bird, partially-eaten pretzel, or watchful gargoyle might carry the promise of a new beginning.

— Simmy Swinder Voellmy