'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.
