Headfirst: Noah Beyene
We are thrilled to be presenting Headfirst, a debut exhibition by Noah Beyene, at our London gallery's AFA Project Space in September 2023.
'A naked man is caught suspended, mid-dive, above a glassy, black lake. His torso and thighs are illuminated by a kind of parchment green, like an El Greco saint. A young couple, the woman visibly pregnant, lounge at the water’s edge on a checked rug; her eyes are black holes and fade off to her right, while the man stares into a night sky that is kept from our view. The first question that the composition of Noah Beyene’s Headfirst (2023) asks principally concerns narrative. Are the man and the couple related, physically, in the here and now, perhaps friends or acquaintances, or does he stand (or jump) as a metaphor for their predicament of risk and grace under pressure as young parents? We cannot help but think about cephalic birth: the way most of us enter the world, headfirst, thrown into a set of circumstances that we never chose but are now all we will ever know. The title of course refers to the technique of the diver entering the water, which is right there in front of us, but also a state or feeling of recklessness. To go on your nerve. To baulk at restraint. A transitional state and yet, here, held perfectly in place.
As in all his paintings, Beyene imbues a profound look of fidelity to our lives, not unlike a nineteenth-century realist playwright, while always representing a heightened atmosphere of feeling that cannot be directly represented but lurks, in a sideways expression or fleeting glance, somewhere in the shadows, painfully there and yet unseen. More than anything else, Beyene is willing to risk the big gesture: to take hold of the problem of figurative painting in an age of over-saturation of stylised image-making, and render the form newly exciting and daring.
We find Beyene at the start of a promising career. The present exhibition at Addis Fine Arts is the first solo gallery show of his works to date. Born in Stockholm to a Swedish mother, a teacher, and an Ethiopian father, an artist, Beyene’s works often depict those close to him, friends and family, who are reimagined as though siphoned through the pulsating lens of the cinematic auteur. Beyene’s paintings often feel like tableau vivants in oil paint: they are unflinching stories, scenes, snapshots into a life, while always oscillating between the literal and the profound. Like us, Beyene knows the most present people in our lives well: the shape of a friend’s wrist, the drop of a grandmother’s shoulder, the arc in the heel of a lover still sleeping beside us. Like us, Beyene knows how much is at stake in an attentive life, and how much meaning can be tenuously held, like an over-heating valve, in the parts that keep us connected to those we love.
Beyene’s most recent body of works, all but two produced in watercolour and oil on linen in the summer of 2023, overtly take up the subject of the nocturne as a starting point but not an end. These new works tenderly depict two sides of metropolitan activity at night. One half is dominated by the spontaneous world of friendship and revelry, in the park or by the lake long after the sun has set, a place where wine flows and silent intimacies are formed away from the inebriated hum; and its reverse, when all has settled and interactions of any kind have melted into the black, and you find yourself totally and painfully alone.
In Dialectic (2023), Beyene manages to imbue an extraordinary religiosity into the scene, as though Fra Angelico had stumbled upon stretched-out bohemians on the shores of the Söderström. An illuminated woman on the left of the composition closes her eyes, far away in a trance, while a younger woman, turned away from us, studies her palm with the intensity of a pilgrim on discovering a requillary. A foreboding man in an open-collared white-buttoned-down, whose face remains in half in darkness, stares ferociously as the distant embers of the cityscape beyond burn like water set alight by blue halogen. All the nocturnal paintings are set in places that the artist spent time in his youth and adolescence. They sparkle with the faintest flash of nostalgia or, more accurately, should be seen as a kind of minnesbild, the Swedish concept that translates as a ‘memory-image’, or the vivid visual quality of a moment recollected long after it has passed. In this, we can all relate to Beyene’s masterful strokes: it is often the feeling elicited by our reaction to something, and not the thing itself, that we remember most powerfully. By using the minnesbild as a strategy to seek out his compositions, Beyene recovers not events in remembered places, but the atmosphere of another time – the falling light, the presence of a friend – and with it his memories of feeling.
Several contemporary painters, such as Lynette Yiadom-Boakye and Jennifer Packer, have taken up the subject of light with the same enthusiasm as the School of Delft or the Caravaggisti. Beyene, too, should be part of this conversation: his ability to emphasise extraordinarily localised areas of light, while not compromising the shadow-play of the whole composition, is a singular gift. Night Fell, Day Broke (2023) is a sumptuous overflow of fleshy crevices and flooded pockets of colour. The male figure, a self-portrait, raises his head and is consumed by the fresh morning sunlight. Like a misshapen halo, in which a mark of some kind of revelation is told to us but in an unsuspecting place, the golden light on his face is as much a sign of happenstance as divine providence. Who among us has not awoken at an ungodly hour, wretched from a nightmare or residual anxiety, and believed the world to be different than it is? Laid between his lover’s lazy ankles and the morning light, all that is revealed is that life is just as it should be.'
Exhibition text written by Matthew Holman
