‘Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.’
Dylan Thomas
Yves Beaumont paints landscapes. And also seascapes and clouds, which for convenience we will classify under ‘landscapes and related motifs.’ So it seems simple: he is a landscape painter. Yet it is more subtle, complex and comprehensive than that.
Landscape painting is an old genre – like still life and the portrait – and it seems worn out. There is the tradition, the burden of centuries, but there is also, fortunately, the insight and achievements of countless predecessors. Yves Beaumont may paint a landscape, the sea or a cloudy sky – in fact, they are only starting points, actually he is working on other things.
I will explain myself further.
Yves Beaumont looks. He looks thoroughly and slowly. He looks as a painter and also as a teacher – he teaches at the Academy in Bruges. He has developed a good eye, in all senses, for nature and for the image. And he knows the tradition. But first I want to touch on something else. Yves lives by the sea, but he literally keeps his distance.
He lives in a nearby village in the hinterland, where as it happens he has his studio. That is just far enough from Ostend to “see” the sea as a pretext, an idea, not as a reality to be painted. Nearby are the polders, and above him, of course, there is the sky with its clouds.
Beaumont watches and filters those impressions. And he lets tradition set in. Speaking of that tradition, William Turner is an essential painter for Yves Beaumont. Turner’s masterful Sun Setting over a Lake and Seascape with Distant Coast (both c. 1840) in Tate Britain are oil paintings full of liquid light, where the scorching sun dissolves and consumes the visible forms. He is also familiar with the sketches and preliminary studies of John Constable – the weatherman of Suffolk. I am thinking especially of the unsurpassed Rainstorm over the Sea of about 1825, an oil on paper at the Royal Academy in London. A snapshot that has more to do with paint than meteorology. And there is, not to be forgotten, Jean-Baptiste Corot, with his seemingly simple landscapes, averse to any anecdotalism, in all shades of brown, ochre and gray-blue.
There are also – inevitably – the great predecessors in Ostend itself: Ensor, Spilliaert, Permeke and De Cordier. James Ensor was fascinated by light but even more by paint: he was perhaps the first to think in paint and to let paint speak, without losing sight of figuration, visible reality. There is Léon Spilliaert, the night tsar of Ostend, who let his city-by-the-sea expand in enticing perspectives and be swallowed up by the blackness of his East Indian ink. There is Constant Permeke with his pasty sea in canvases as wide as the horizon. And there is Thierry De Cordier, who wants to surpass even Spilliaert in gloom and heavy blackness. Moreover, De Cordier allows his landscapes to metamorphose into seas. Conversely, his waves transform into mountains.
Yves Beaumont adds his vision. With the joys and burdens of tradition. In his highly personal look and style.
Let me get straight to the heart of his painting: light, stillness and love of paint. He may be a landscape painter, but actually he paints the landscape as an idea. Yes, the best, most fascinating painters in the late 20th and early 21st centuries are conceptual painters. They paint series, they are engaged in the investigation of images and motifs, they use and challenge photography, they transform, cut up or intensify the pictures they take.
Yves Beaumont goes his own way. He stylizes and simplifies his images until there is a hint of a landscape, an “after-image” of what he has seen and experienced. Recognizable, still, but still mainly an idea. He is primarily working with paint and canvas – sometimes with cardboard or paper as a support. He also surprises with the use of the portrait format for his landscapes – and thus not always the classic “landscape” format. Our gaze is directed differently by it.
He applies his paint caressingly, layer after layer like the old masters. The paint treatment is light, transparent and luminous. If you look closely, you can see his hand in the paint strokes; there is invariably movement in his images. He also likes to let the texture of the canvas shine through, does not paint the work “closed” but lets the canvas breathe. He paints raggedly, drawing with paint. And listens to the demands of his composition which makes him go far into geometry or toward abstraction: a forest becomes a series of trunks and thus an almost calligraphic ballet, a cloud exceeds its contours and becomes fluid, and the sea sometimes goes untamable.
Always Beaumont is preoccupied with light, in all its forms and guises. He makes the crests of a turbulent sea or the splashing wake of a ship glow almost bright white. The sea itself is painted in an ominous, unfathomable black, although I must nuance that last immediately, for Beaumont is a refined colourist: his black is not black but an amalgamation of countless colours.
Spruce trees are gnawed at by stark backlight: the trees are black, the sun blinds painter and viewer alike, the shapes of the trees dissolve into gurgling yellow and ochre.
Sometimes a forest flows out over the canvas like a puddle of water, at the top there is harsh white light, somewhere at the bottom the reddish-yellow setting sun shines through an opening between the trees: the small spot seems to set the whole canvas ablaze.
The sea and the forest may often appear threatening, but the light always wins and overcomes the darkness. And it happens silently. For there is a pleasing silence in Beaumont’s paintings: he achieves this silence through far-reaching stylization, the focus on the essential (water, cloud, sky, light) and the absence of any anecdotalism. Furthermore, no living soul appears in his canvases. Nature – the image of nature – plays the leading role.
Isn’t this interplay of light and darkness, fascination and bewilderment, admiration and fear the hallmark of the experience of the sublime?
The clouds, the many clouds, that Yves Beaumont has been painting in recent years produce a wonderful series of small formats. Here the light plays a different role, because usually clouds reflect light while the background is dark. The clouds shine in their liquid brightness, in their haze of light. Even there, white is not white. He indulges in grays, greens, browns and blues. A white cloud he can skim with ochre yellow. It is a play of light and paint.
There are no people and hardly any points of reference in his paintings. The sea “is” there; the viewer is at sea with him and in the middle of it. Intrusive everyday reality is banished. The painter focuses on things and phenomena that are eminently ephemeral, but which he allows to solidify in paint. A cloud only exists for a fraction of a second, it constantly changes shape. Light is immaterial, reflected on the surface of water, swallowed by black, but never the same. The sun sinks and slowly disappears among the trees: every day, every day different. The waves of the sea are eternal but above all eternally changing. The landscape, the horizon, often high, is eternal. But even that horizon exists only thanks to light.
The light gives and the light takes.
Yves Beaumont pits his paint against debilitating time. He is a keeper. Like the main character in the novel Winter Light. A Forgotten Book from 1984 by Jeroen Brouwers. Jacob Voorlandt does not paint clouds but photographs them: ‘I make eternity out of the most precious thing imaginable in nature,’ he says.
Yves Beaumont withdraws. In his studio. Far from the commotion, far from the noise and far from the daily iconoclasm, he paints the essence: light, triumphant light. In paint. With his landscapes, moreover, he wants to defy time, outsmart transience.
Call it: self-portraits. There is obviously a lot of himself in his paintings.
Eric Rinckhout