True Myths Julie Beaufils

Overview
True Myths, Julie Beaufils
Mendes Wood DM is pleased to feature the project True Myths of French artist Julie Beaufils in Brazil. Based on an observation of the city as an organism in function of time, the artist displays a series of paintings that the spectator could observe as an exercise of temporal displacement.

Beaufils relates to figuration and abstraction through her choice for the use of colors and graphic structures, exploring the space in between what you see and what goes unperceived. The artist’s research proposes a reflection on the presence of the ephemeral – how a moment is constructed in the mind of the observer, how memories work – using painting as her medium.

The city and the manner in which we deal with the environment are the two starting points for the recognition or estrangement of the gaze of the things surrounding it. On her first visit to São Paulo – a city which aesthetically transits between post-colonial and modernist structures – the artist raises questions regarding fluid identity, which is not attached to a necessity to preserve itself, but rather to explore new territories and consider the responsibility of the form as a way to dilute itself in a variety of aesthetic references.

The canvases propose structures that open up unexpected spaces of intimacy, exactly where intimacy seems least possible. The empty spaces in her paintings determine the choice of rhythm rather than a precise object. Not objectifying this observation of the city, the result finds a place that’s common among cities regardless of their geography, leading the spectator to the proposed nearmess.
Installation Views
Back to exhibitions