A good recent satire of the contemporary art world's foibles and excesses isn't an artwork, or even a piece of writing. It is a website, or more precisely, an online artist's statement generator. At www.artybollocks.com, the visitor clicks a button that says "Generate some bollocks", and a faux statement appears replete with lofty concerns, name-checking all the right philosophers.I didn't like the first one I got, so I coerced it a bit, pressing the button repeatedly. It told me I was "very demanding", but still yielded a great statement for a body of work that doesn't even exist:"My work explores the universality of myth and life as performance ... With influences as diverse as Rousseau and Buckminster Fuller, new insights are distilled from both traditional and modern structures ..." And so it continues.The point is that contemporary art has become so mannered, so predictable, that its language is at once highly coded and incredibly vague. A form of international art-speak has developed, which mostly prioritises thought above feeling.So it's refreshing to look at the work of Ricky Burnett, famed Johannesburg-based painter, curator and teacher. A book recently published by Palimpsest, which carries the same title as a body of work Burnett completed between 2014 and 2016, Troubled with Goya, gives an insight into Burnett's working process, and also into the incredible surfaces of his paintings. LAVA YOUR WORK: 'Goya Adaptations Ivories' by Ricky Burnett Picture: LIZ WHITTERThe layered, agitated oil paint is endlessly evocative, here reminiscent of aging skin, there more dramatic and redolent of cooling lava, with flashes of vermillion breaking through the overall black.Burnett's work clearly takes a long time to make, a point he makes in the book's interview with Tracey Hawthorne: "Ninety-eight percent of the painting is just grind - you're putting it on and putting it on and then scraping it off; you're asking yourself, 'If I do this, what then?'."As he reveals, Burnett begins each work with a loose but fairly faithful sketch in paint of an image by 18th century Spanish master Francisco de Goya, taken from one of five series of images that he made during his lifetime. In particular, Burnett was drawn to the images of Goya's which reveal some sort of social consciousness. Burnett then disturbs the image, trying to get at something the book calls "the feel of Goya's images 'without the head hanging from the tree, without ... heaps of bodies'."His searching mode of making art simultaneously battles the surfaces and his notions of what paintings should do. The book plays off double-page spreads of the works, arranged as they were exhibited, with close-up details of individual paintings revealing their thick, encrusted surfaces.In fact, the photographer, Liz Whitter, has gotten nearer to the works than the average viewer would ever be allowed at a gallery. The result is a tome of rare intimacy, an unusually deep insight into the creative process.In an age of art falling prey to the McCulture of quickly-consumed and easily-digested little snippets, nuggets of meaning that don't seem to add up to much, it's exciting to see a book which captures the importance of presence, time and focus in both the making and viewing of art.Burnett's work will also be on show at the upcoming FNB Joburg Art Fair; here's hoping it provides ballast to some of the lingua franca of the one-liner...