Surfaces, Reflections, and the Religion of Repetition

You’ve been here before, even if you haven’t.

The red booths, the hanging lamps, the vinyl tile floor that squeaks a little when it’s been freshly mopped. The poster with the cartoon owl winking through the glass. A Dr Pepper machine gleaming like an altar. You could almost smell the fry oil if it weren’t for the stillness. But it’s not a memory. It’s a painting. Ralph Goings made it in 1972, with oil on canvas, and titled it Burger Chef Interior. And even now, more than fifty years later, it’s still glowing, quietly, on a wall at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

Goings was part of the Photorealist movement, a group of artists who rejected the splatter and gesture of Abstract Expressionism in favor of a world that looked, well, exactly like the one we were in. Not prettier. Not messier. Just truer. He painted trucks, condiments, and fast food counters. Things we’re trained not to look at twice. But Goings did. And what he saw, what he preserved, was a kind of accidental holiness.

The world in Burger Chef Interior isn’t dramatic. No one is eating. No one is fighting. No Elvis sighting or golden-hour romance. It’s just space. The morning light slants across tabletops. A Wonder Bread truck sits idling behind a pane of glass. The booths are empty. The owl on the window promises, “We OWLways treat you right.” No one’s there to prove or disprove it.

But look closer. That’s the trick. The glass divides but also multiplies. Your eye slips between layers—the reflection of the bread truck, the interior lights, the poster, the checkerboard floor. It’s like staring into a dream of order. A kind of suburban cathedral. The kind where nothing happens, but everything repeats. Where the rituals are ketchup, napkins, and tray liners. Where transcendence is offered in combo meals.

Goings, like his fellow Photorealists, worked from photographs, not as an afterthought but as a method. He didn’t chase spontaneity. He planned. He selected. He set the frame long before he touched the canvas. The result is a strange feeling of distance, not cold, but careful. A painting that doesn’t beg for your emotions. It just waits. And somehow, that waiting pulls you in deeper than sentiment ever could.

It’s worth remembering what America looked like in 1972. The war in Vietnam was still raging. Nixon was unraveling. Civil rights gains were being contested in every corner of the country. The optimism of the sixties had cracked. And in that fracture, the nation turned inward, toward order, toward sameness, toward plastic comfort. Fast food became a way to control the chaos. A cheeseburger always tasted the same. A booth always felt familiar. But Goings didn’t romanticize that sameness. He documented it. And in doing so, exposed the strange beauty and strangeness of the world we built to forget ourselves in.

There’s no one in the painting. No server behind the counter. No customer is about to unwrap their sandwich. That absence becomes its own kind of presence. You imagine who was just there. You wonder who’s coming next. You start to fill in the silence with your own memories, even if you’ve never eaten at a Burger Chef. Even if the chain disappeared before you were born.

Photorealism was once mocked as too literal, too shallow, a painterly stunt. But the critics missed the deeper move. Goings wasn’t showing off what paint could mimic. He was revealing what culture hides. That the spaces we ignore are often the ones that shape us most. That the booths we slide into, the posters we barely notice, the fake wood paneling, the sticky tile, all of it becomes part of us. We don’t remember the meal. We remember the light.

And maybe that’s why this painting lingers.

It lingers because it doesn’t demand anything. It just shows you the world as it was, and asks you what you’ve done with it. It shows you a temple of formica and fried smells and fluorescent geometry, and lets you decide if that’s sacred or sad.

Me? I think it’s both.

I look at that owl on the window, ridiculous, earnest, dated, and I hear its slogan in a different tone. “We OWLways treat you right.” Not a promise. Not a pun. But a kind of ghostly refrain. Something leftover from when we thought uniformity was kindness. When familiarity was safety. When a clean booth and a full tray were enough to feel okay for thirty minutes before the world came rushing back in.

We used to go to places like this without a second thought. We barely saw them. But Goings did.

And now, thanks to him, we do too.

Photograph by the author. Burger Chef Interior (1972) by Ralph Goings. Oil on canvas, 39 3/8 × 56 in. Collection of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Virginia. Gift of Sydney and Frances Lewis, Object Number: 85.393. Image used under fair use for the purpose of critical commentary and cultural analysis. Copyright © Ralph Goings (death + 70).