Beaux Mendes

Beaux Mendes explores painting as a transitory medium – a means of transition and becoming on uncertain ground. In the densely layered abstract compositions of the Los Angeles-based artist, figuration shimmers 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. It is not about showing what is already visible, but rather about uncovering the invisible – that which must not show itself. The works remind us that the image can never be entirely perceptible, or even conceptually graspable. The picture supports – whether linen, wood, parchment, or panels – play a crucial role. Instead of concealing them in the service of illusion, Mendes repeatedly scrapes and wipes away the layer of paint to reveal its own texture. This process brings ghostly forms to life and underscores an impression of incompleteness.

Mendes’ works investigate – and deconstruct – European-American traditions of landscape and plein air painting; the latter, a 19th-century development, is often associated with the colonial appropriation and aestheticization of so-called “unexplored” territories. In Mendes’ case, however, repeated journeys to remote places such as the Angeles National Forest in California or the Black Forest and the Elbe Valley in Germany serve as a critical reflection on the ideologies that have shaped landscapes: exploitation, erasure, and painting as a tool of imperial rule and ethnonationalism. Through persistent material exploration and embodied research, Mendes’ paintings open up new spaces of imagining and feeling – spaces that resist closure and enable other perspectives on and relationships to land, memory, and form. Thus, the artist reactivates the genre of landscape painting as a place of transformative potential.

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

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