Through the Atmospheric

Some thoughts on Yves Beaumont’s recent paintings

A painter barricades himself or herself in the studio, which as it were becomes a place where memories of the world are deliberately transformed with physical matter. It is and remains a miracle how painters, just armed with some tubes or pots of paint, brushes and supports—whether the latter are paper, canvas or wooden panels—still manage to paint the soul of reality and thus continue to hold the public visually and mentally spellbound.

Painters constitute a wonderful front within the fragmented contemporary art world, because of the craftsmanship required for the realization of a painting—for which there’s no alternative. Though mobile phones, laptops and other media used for intermediary and instant image reproduction can facilitate the creation of a work of art, the painter is still in cold sweat when confronted with the emptiness of the support that invites meaning.

For a long time now, Yves Beaumont has been navigating the wide world of Belgian—mainly Flemish—painting in his peculiar, delicate and obstinate way. What is striking in this long, productive span is how he opposes every form of evolution: a soft, mild resistance against the unspoken rule in (the world of) art that constantly demands innovation.

His oeuvre stands its ground in a persistent, long movement, in which a keen looking at the surroundings is combined with a sustained study of the works of great masters such as William Turner or Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot. These are painters of bygone days who were unequalled in their juggling with the light they ‘saw’ through the paint on the canvas. These ‘modern’ artists risked their artistic reputation by breaking with imitative and naturalistic conventions, and not afraid of whatever sanction that could befall them, they defied the public’s expectations. The modern artists that continue to compel Beaumont’s attention were in fact climate artists long before the term had been coined. They knew how to capture with paint the smog or the light of the sun that peeks through the trees in the woods, in a way that somehow seemed awkward and tended towards abstraction.

The light that fascinates Beaumont is certainly not the light he experiences every day as a human being and painter in the place where he lives: near the sea in Ostend. The light that does interest him is subdued: not the spectacular light of the sea, but an atmospherical light. For example, the light that glows from a dense forest into which the sun as it were ‘radiates’ here and there ephemeral open spaces of agonizingly bright light. It’s precisely these short-lived, quickly disappearing moments Beaumont succeeds in capturing with paint on the support.

His motifs are/have remained sparse. They are the opposite of motifs that are labelled ‘spectacular’. In the insignificant that eludes us, which some like to categorize as ‘sublime’, the artist succeeds in projecting the relevance of his artistic calling, both with regard to the history of modern art and the unfathomable mood of people that now wander the post-corona era. People that haven’t completely coped with the mental slap of the vanishing social contacts—and often stay behind, surviving on a new, restoring longing for mental self-help through constant experiences in the ‘cathartic’ nature. This ‘eerie’ feeling that is almost impossible to describe, hides deeply in Beaumont’s art: a pictorial oeuvre that presents itself as a rippling lake near the capricious North Sea. Apparently the artist feels at ease living with this paradox. Beaumont, as an accomplished painter, knows how to paint implacably his perfect sense of the light and its memories thereof. And the private practice of painting is all about the unique character of the paintings created.

With sparse motifs, he succeeds in manifesting his artistic will, and through deliberate pictorial movements he transforms this into an incessantly bristling and therefore unique visual image. Constant repetitions of at first sight ‘the same’ constitute the soul of his pictorial oeuvre, which as such takes no moral stance on the social events in our complex, global, very small and in the meantime entirely demystified world. At most, there’s the suggestion of a virgin state in the work, of a deafening (site-related) silence that resounds in the twilight world of the ‘green’ fake reality. It’s in fact a reality that hardly still exists or at most is preserved in parks and reserves as fake instant products we are presumed to consume in order to briefly balance the hectic life of contemporary life, to charge life with ‘energy’—a life that is programmed to invest in returns.

The works allude to a still and slowed down process of looking and thinking. The paintings cause the mind to congeal till it reaches a level where a sense-stimulating, track-stand degree zero takes over the perception of the work. The leanness of the versatile acrylics sets in the structure of the canvas, as well as in the deep grooves and folds of the adventurous history of painting. The diluted paint, which withdraws in the support as if it were ebb, ‘opens up’ in a hard to define fullness. Paul Cézanne: ‘When the colour is rich, the form is at its height.’

The titles of the paintings emphasize the emotional substructure of Beaumont’s art. Cloudscape, Nocturne, Towards evening, Threshold, Arcadia, The afterglow,… These are all titles that suggest a poetizing standstill. Corot was the master of painting the backlight, caves and a light entering in a way it would never enter paintings after him. Yves Beaumont eagerly studies his brilliant classical masters, carrying on where they left off, painting small series in which the quality of the small differences in colour and shape generously appeal to the time required from the spectator. Nature is stripped of its timelessness. Patiently painted stripes and beams of light—subdued or not—draw attention to Beaumont’s ‘unsuspecting’ compositions, which like in a whirl cause the sparse, bright brushstrokes to turn into the ‘surroundness’ of a painted, unfathomable darkness. Lots of Beaumont’s works even make our thoughts stray into the world of eroticising art from the mid-nineteenth century, reminding us of such paintings as Gustave Courbet’s The Origin of the World, and also modern painting as such, which shook the foundations of simply all art.

Beaumont’s paintings seek our empathy and are averse to the grand gesture and grand discourse. His work murmurs and ripples on the rhythm of everyday life as it passes, like in his paintings with the title Waterlines, in which the deliciously rippling motif is derived from the soft movement of the water washing ashore, creating a distinctive relief pattern in the sand through natural coincidental shifts in time and space.

The coincidence of the moment causes a painter to continue positioning himself or herself in a unique manner with regard to the concept of the representation of reality. In this resides the essence of Yves Beaumont’s pictorial itineraries, which being site-related also refer to his roots and the light that plays a part—and then again, doesn’t play a part… For the rich and inspiring history of painting is always lurking behind the corner as a lively presence peeking at the canvas.

Emile Zola: ‘A work of art is a corner of the universe, seen through the prism of a certain temperament.’

Luk Lambrecht