Press
Jonathan Beer: Coming Together, Falling Apart
Jonathan Goodman, 2010
A painter who combines architectural structures with residual images of memory, Jonathan Beer has written of his art in the following way: “Actions associated with cognition and memories are of particular interest to me. The dichotomy between decay and instantiation of these worlds serves as a starting point of my vision.” He brings specific figurative talents to his abstract ideas, creating images of worlds and constructions that seem to be midway between coming together and falling apart. The relic, or fragment, carries with it an aura of intense nostalgia; in Beer’s case, we see him carefully building manmade contrivances in the middle of gorgeous landscapes and cloudscapes, which appear to be breaking apart and falling into the atmosphere. This is both a public and a private apocalypse, whose meaning remains pretty much outside our knowledge. Yet, at the same time, the work feels as if it were commenting on the failure of human efforts and the destructive aspects of nature, which meld in works whose precision both instructs and menaces the comfortable viewer. While the essence of memory seems to inform these paintings, Beer is not calling up personal remembrances so much as assembling them in ways that focus on their general application in the field of nature or culture.
This means that Beer has had to abstract his sense of memory in order to paint it objectively—with titles like Noumena (Cognition) and Longitudinal Memory Slice, it becomes clear that he is interested in representing ideas about the mind and its ability—or lack thereof—to fashion a hyperrealism out of what can be seen and what can be imagined. As Beer comments, “Through research and introspection, I have created a specific vocabulary to interpret memory by combining symbolism with diagrammatic elements.” His schematic paintings show us that the correlative to the mind’s processes may be found in the partial objectification of an abstraction that otherwise would be lost to our awareness, so intent are we on both the passing moment and those to come. Although they are meant to represent a backward gaze, the paintings also speak to the future; in an ecological sense, they look what’s ahead in nature, whose manmade apocalypse may be nearer than we think. The precision whereby Beer renders the unthinkable real is hard earned and genuine; one has the feeling that his images agree with basic insights into thought. Just as his compositions can be seen both as cohering or fracturing, so his ideas may be seen as synthesizing or analyzing parts of the whole.
It is interesting to see how Beer’s dichotomies fare as paintings. In Pontifex I (2010), the artist has painted a series of grassland and corresponding root systems that are breaking apart from each other and gradually falling into a cloud-ridden open space. The fragmented landscape is held in place to some extent by a semicircular band that soon, it is clear, will not be strong enough to stop the event. Above, clouds in shadow and a glowing sky give the impression that we are viewing the twilight, a time when the light seems especially lyric. This is a visionary painting of the end of the world, where all known manner of support ceases to be useful, yielding to the unknown future. The viewer should bear in mind that the dissolution of landscape and space presents itself as wondrous and beautiful; sometimes destruction presents itself as incomparably attractive, given our interest in what is ruined beyond help. Longitudinal Memory Slice (2009) offers a cross section of a mountainous landscape that comes down to a river; this slice of nature is also occurring against a curved support. One can see the clouded sky, the reflection of the mountains in water, and the soil underneath the far bank of the river. Schematic lines, broken and unbroken, turn the image into something like an architectural plan; these lines are attached to strips of wood that enter into the pictorial plane.
Noumena (Cognition) (2009) is a small, circular painting in which the landscape seems to have levitated only to be broken up in the sky. Again, Beer’s tactics are visionary, with the bits and pieces of broken earth falling apart in what look like ever-diminishing pixels as the image recedes toward a blue sea. The violent nature of the image is underscored by the presence of two airplane-like elements that look like they have caught fire in midair; this is a prophecy of apocalypse that owes as much to video-game imagery as to the workings of the mind. In general, and as happens in Noumena Cognition, Beer finds the correlative to his visionary, sometimes anarchic imagination. He is really most interested in discovering the visual terms whereby the process of memory breaks through consciousness into the real world. As a result, Beer’s art develops parallels between the mind’s unfettered activities and the way they might play in a diagram of considerable complexity. This is as it should be—our thought processes, and our relation to memory, are too intricate to be imaged easily. In Beer’s challenging, memorable art, the need to be specific about memory is assuaged by his decision to imagine it in often warlike and schematic states. The results are compelling, not because they are inherently apocalyptic, but because they are so brilliantly realized as imagery and art.