Beaux Mendes

Beaux Mendes develops painting as a passing medium – a means of transition and becoming on unstable ground. In the densely layered abstract compositions of the Los Angeles–based artist, figuration flickers between emergence and withdrawal, between condensation and erasure. The works seek an in-between: a fluid, provisional and resistant state. Mendes’ painting takes its time and resists traditional representation. The point is not to show what is already visible but to uncover the invisible – that which may not show itself. The works remind us that the image can never be fully perceptible, let alone fully grasped by thought. The supports – whether linen, wood, parchment or panels – play a decisive role. Rather than concealing them in the service of illusion, Mendes repeatedly scrapes and wipes away the layer of paint to expose each one’s own texture. This process brings ghostly forms to life and underlines an impression of the incomplete.

Mendes’ works examine – and deconstruct – European-American traditions of landscape and plein-air painting; the latter, a nineteenth-century development, is often associated with the colonial appropriation and aestheticization of so-called “unexplored” territories. In Mendes’ work, by contrast, repeated journeys to remote places such as the Angeles National Forest in California or the Black Forest and the Elbe Valley in Germany serve a critical reflection on the ideologies that have been imprinted on landscapes: exploitation, erasure, and painting as a tool of imperial domination and ethnonationalism. Through persistent material exploration and embodied research, Mendes’ paintings open new spaces of imagining and feeling – spaces that resist closure and enable other ways of seeing and relating to land, memory and form. In this way the artist reactivates the genre of landscape painting as a site of transformative potential.

At the Secession, Mendes presents mainly new works, some of which were created during a residency in Vienna. The exhibition brings together diverse facets of the oeuvre, including recent works in sculpture and more explicitly figurative paintings.

Beaux Mendes is a guest as artist-in-residence in May, in cooperation with PART International Art Residency Austria.