Contributed by Jason Andrew / It’s easy to associate the new paintings by Julie Beaufils, now on view at Matthew Brown Gallery in Tribeca, with a post-apocalyptic world. The sixteen paintings suggest fractured architectures and abandoned fields, sun baked and rising from a humming radioactive haze. Beaufils lives and works in Paris, and her precise lines and delineated spaces capture its curving promenades, narrowed boulevards, and sinking perspectives. Travels to Los Angeles and the American Southwest have also influenced this new work.
Beaufils takes a minimalist approach in these restrained yet evocative paintings, emphasizing color, form, and gesture over narrative. By balancing sparsity with expressive nuance, she monetizes on ambiguity to cash in on psychological depth. Balancing sparsity with expressive nuance, Beaufils connects with contemporary concerns about feeling, memory, and the interplay between abstraction and personal experience. Lola Kramer, in her essay accompanying the show, mentions the influence of the Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni’s “tonal arrangements” and “painterly minimalism.”
Multiple Suns is one of six large paintings. It’s earthy tones and receding perspective set the precedent. These elements give the show an atmospheric sense of warmth and stillness. The square format consistent in every work, situates the paintings between landscape and portraiture, intensifying a sense of ambiguity. The title Desert Resort might suggest a particular place but leaves us to contemplate the starky terrain. The same goes for Dust. These paintings, both of which sample a sand-blown setting and imply thirst, cue looking rather than understanding.
In Cyclic Exchanges, a large circular form faintly appears through a misty blue hue. It’s hard to determine whether the form is coming into sight or slipping away. There is a sci-fi feeling about the painting. Like Syd Mead (1933-2019), the visionary designer behind the sci-fi films Blade Runner and Tron, Beaufils offers just the right measure of plausibility to make fantastical concepts feel believable in her cinematic blur. Her brilliance is not just in the futures she designs, but in her approach to imagining them.
Forest, has a velocity and animation that differs from the rest. Perhaps inspired by a photo Beaufils saw of people camping near Chernobyl, it involves slivers of scaffolding and sailing window shapes emerging from a single-point center perspective while a ghostly city rises in the foreground. Everything about this painting seems ephemeral, as though the experience would vanish if we turned our heads or closed our eyes. It recalls Tony Smith’s known description of a nighttime drive on an unfinished portion of the New Jersey Turnpike as “artificial landscape without cultural precedent.” Explained Smith: “There were no lights or shoulder markers, lines, railings, or anything at all except the dark pavement moving through the landscape of the flats, rimmed by hills in the distance, but punctuated by stacks, towers, fumes, and colored lights.” The experience liberated him from views he had had about art. “It seems that there had been a reality there that had not had any expression.” Beaufils’ painting too is a reality-shifting state of far-outness.
Ten small works, most measuring just under twelve inches square, serve as compact portals into Beaufils’ lost lands and nicely isolate her core technique, which keys on a single layer of pigment soaked into unprimed linen and a sharp charcoal drafting line. Cannonball is on linen while Underwater is on panel, and they are intentionally hung in close proximity emphasizing the importance varying surfaces can forward intention in her work.
Like Mark Rothko, Hedda Sterne, and Clyfford Still, Beaufils has mastered a technique that allows her to capture subjective experience and spontaneity and channel ineffable human emotions. She has continued Ad Reinhardt’s endeavor to “push painting beyond its thinkable, seeable, graspable, feelable limits,” and doing so with a impending end of times beauty.
“Julie Beaufils: Slow Definition,” Matthew Brown Gallery, 390 Broadway, New York, NY. Through March 15, 2025.
About the author: Jason Andrew is an independent curator and writer based in Cypress Hills, Brooklyn. Follow him on Instagram: @jandrewarts
