Basil Beattie

Basil Beattie by Victor De Circasia Basil Beattie (1935 West Hartlepool-England) is a major figure in the British avant-garde of the late twentieth century and an important precursor to the development of the abstract art. In both respects he has influenced a young generation of British artists. This exhibition presents three works, examining Beattie’s contribution to modern trends, his innovative and allegorical use of colour, his prominent use of symbols, his deep interest in pictorial space and surface in the art work and his own self-fashioning use of colour and use of iconography and textures: all an unique expression of his work. These examples of Beattie’s paintings are an extension of his recent Janus series paintings and drawings which are installed in a simultaneous exhibitions in the Purdy Hicks Gallery and the Eagle Gallery in London and will help to understand the overlapping network of themes and images to produce a complete picture of this daring, experimental body of work. Ultimately, this exhibition presents Basil Beattie as a historically engaged and self-critical artist involved with the issues of his times and with contemporary debates on the very nature of colour and modernism. The exhibition, which is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, is part of an ambition project of exhibitions in Public Places of the B-art Contemporary Association. In Beattie’s paintings there is an absence of nostalgia, of time and, perhaps, of place. The glowing energy of his painting’s colour brings about excitement and promise with the gestural vivacity of his brush strokes. The intensity in Beattie works depends partly on its very stylistic abruptness and, in his later work, a tendency to revolve around a search for the emptiness without defined limits and to extract the greatest range of meanings from a strictly limited idiom of signals, mark outs, brush strokes, colours, textures and many other painterly optical devices to open the painting into the space. The notion of working in series has allowed Beattie to play with variations to register most forcefully against a fairly constant visual language of repetition. The group of Janus paintings, which are in his London show is a creative impulse transcending the parameters of a single act, a single painting or a single iconography giving the sense of a mythical presence to the painting as the Roman god. The colour in Basil Beattie’s work is vibrantly alive so much so that the scene is initially hard to make out. He controls the moods and demands of the space. The viewer has little distraction and it’s unlikely that any demand will be easily granted. The space-work surface seems to be shrugging off the task of describing a space or form. These elements make Beattie one of the most accomplished British modern artists today. Beattie took his approach to painting from American artists in particular Rothko, Newman, Mark Tobey and others but even so he has a distant gap from his predecessors in his approach to painting. Beattie’s vibrant settings, using the space for his own advantage, create an intensity of notes, visions and the poetic language of expressive signs in his paintings. The idea of his work is to let the spectator have a problem without solving it and to dissect what the spectator tries to verbalised from the painterly iconography. Once the initial chaos and excitement subsides the painting has a conversation with the viewer in unrelated directions. Beattie doesn’t give concessions or

facilitate a rapport with graphic descriptions of his work. He constantly exchanges information that might surprise our imagination on the identity of his scribbles.