Meadow Brook Art Gallery
Runs through April 16, 2006

“Painting’s dead.” “Painting lives.” The back and forth of such arguments is fairly ridiculous, as we know people said Physics was dead too – a few years before Einstein set the world on its head. Painting is as alive as it’s ever been, and as essential a means of expression and delicious enjoyment. In her retrospective (quite a term for one so young), Kristin Beaver offers a pure demonstration of the vitality and possibility of painting in this day and age.

There are paintings in the entranceway to the gallery, but the show really kicks off, with a visual punch from the far wall of the entrance in the form of two large paintings “Hocus Pocus” and “Big Gulp.” Both feature the same model in a solid, blaringly yellow dress, in the former against a flat, intense red backdrop, and the latter against a white ground, the red all having being contained in the form of the plastic 7/11 mug. “Tabitha Fur” also resides on the same wall – a dramatic lit figure, blonde wigged, bright lipped, pink furry boa, with silver pearlescent shadows on the wall. These works set the tone for the entire exhibition.

Beaver’s paintings are all figurative, she makes use of her friends, dressed up in faux fashion. These are of course impressions of who these people are, of an age, a time, and of a scene, but not really. The dress up element distorts the reality, and the people and their clothes become actors or rather compositional elements in the service of Beaver’s painting needs. It’s certain that she delights in these people and bringing them to a certain kind of life on canvas, the paintings are really a celebration of color and composition which function in the abstract as much if not more so than as representational. She works from photographs quite purposefully – not to labor over the figure but to set up these plays of color and balance in an already flattened out picture plane.

This is already evident in her earlier works on display (way back in 2003-2003!) and her attention to the abstract compositional elements has only grown since then. In “Self-portrait with Dilettante” (from 2003) there is purposefulness in the solid bright green dress on the dilettante and patterned red dress on Beaver. Beyond the interaction of the figures’ forms and colors, Beaver makes an intense exploration of the shadows of the two figures, as they merge, and create an engaging composition as involved as the patterns on their dresses. In a slightly later painting of herself in striped shirt, the shadows behind her become butterfly wings or perhaps the amorphous symmetry found in a Rorschach blot. She elaborates on the shadows further, in two paintings depicting Detroit fashionistas Sarah Lu and Sara La (of Wounds of Sarah http://www.woundsofsarah.com/.) The shadows are a dance of warm color and intricate forms flitting about one another. They are as imbued with life as the figures themselves. Beaver’s development of composition leaps out of the shadows and into the overall presentation of her figures, as in her most recent works she employs some clever cropping, reinforcing the idea of the figure as element of the picture plane, less about modeling and portraiture, and more about a masses of color.

In “Captain America” we see the torso of a male shirtless figure and a little bit of his extremities (wearing a super cool, “where can I get one?!”, Captain America belt buckle). The body is pale, almost devoid of any color, against a warm, yellowish floor. Next to it, “Her from Planet Fur” is a self-portrait, clad in bra and fur cape, skin equally a mass of white. Above her is a solid black cat, bridging the edge between the yellowish floor and white wall, appearing to almost emerge out of the painting onto the white gallery wall. This cat reappears in his own portrait “Sir Velvet Fur” which shows off Beaver’s strengths of composition and color quite in the most pared down of the pieces. The cat is a solid black form (it could be a paper cutout) with only eyes, ears, and paws as distinct from the black. The backdrop is a shade of pink, and the cat casts two alternate colder and warmer shadows. Beaver delineates the cat from the background with a soft edge of green, indicative of the sort of good, but seemingly minor choices which she makes throughout all the work to push and pull with the figure and the ground.

If one does focus on the paintings as figures, there are moments of awkwardness, clunky figuration that asks for a bit more resolve. But as her evolution as painter has been rapid (observe the quality of the surfaces from the earliest paintings to the most recent), these sorts of moments are disappearing or being subsumed by the greater attention to the more significant elements. As impressive as her growth has been in this short time, it’s interesting to note just how consistent of a vision she has maintained. One could imagine Beaver’s future work delving into the pure abstract, yet she clearly delights so much in the play, the fiction of her reality created on the canvas, it seems more likely she will continue to forge this balance between the recognizable and playful, alongside the abstract and optical. As she branches into the more compositional, there is an equal leap into capturing a sincerity of emotion in her portraits, as in a nice pairing of paintings from the neck up of “Jo Beth” (possibly a self-portrait in disguise?) Such paintings really indicate her commitment to the figure and her figures in particular.

While the catalogue is, as is typical of Meadow Brook, thorough and wonderfully articulate as composed by director Dick Goody, Beaver’s paintings demand to be seen in person. Reproductions hardly do the scale and intensity of color justice. The show is instructive and inspiring for young painters, and a visual treat for all. So go see it.

Painting is dead?

Long live painting.

Keep playing in this rich territory Kristin Beaver, we’re better for it. – Nick Sousanis
ws@thedetroiter.com