Painting Experiences

During the last few days of my function in Nantes I had one of those not easily forgotten experiences with painters. Khales Benfred, around 50 years old, is one of the greatest talents of his whole generation (in the eighties he had shared the same Paris gallery with Siegfried Anzinger, Alois Mosbacher und Hubert Schmalix before he fell out with the owner and generally withdrew from exhibitions). And now I heard he was anxious to speak to me. Our conversation started off with the visits to ateliers where we had regarded his half-finished paintings. Then, all of the sudden, Khaled Benfred blurted out his reason for so badly wanting to see me. “Ces tableaux de Béatrice Dreux sont absolument phatastiques!” The paintings of Béatrice Dreux, which could be seen in a small exhibition at Art Academy of Nantes, were the most interesting he’d encountered in a long Time. Many of them came across as almost underdeveloped, but in a positive sense, as these paintings were so exquisitely sure of themselves and brimming with insistent power that the painter could get away with virtually any topic. Khaled Benfred, surely one of the best painters of France and of his homeland Tunisia, was sitting there in front of me and simply couldn’t restrain himself: “No, really, this is great. This kind of painting is an experience for me. What talent! What power! Hopefully she’ll keep on like this. I think your bringing these paintings to Nantes was probably the best thing you’ve done in your six years here.” And then he added: “But you know, the professors at the academy look at these paintings and are appalled that you would show such work as model to students, while hey, in the tradition of French conceptual thinking, try so hard from day one to drive out every urge to just seemingly work away like that. The professors are appalled and they think now that you’re about to leave the school you ́ve gone off the rails by exhibiting these paintings. That makes me even happier: they don’t understand anything...”

One is always speechless in such moments. When a painter whose work is as important as Khaled Benfred’s goes on such a Yrade, you usually can’t get a word in edgewise. The statements come indirectly from their own work, are well considered, and are important to the artist’s own emotional household. And this wasn’t even primarily about the paintings of Béatrice Dreux, as Benfred had had a private dispute with the very narrow concept of art that is currently widespread in France and which dominates the academies. At the same Time, it’s always very interesting to hear what a painter has to say about his colleagues, whether they be from the same generation, a previous century, or of much younger age. In this respect, there are no generaYonal barriers, because genuine painters oIen understand each other purely on the basis of mutual appraisal of their work. I still clearly recall when, aIer visiting an exhibition opening at Paris gallery where Khaled Benfred was exhibiting, Siegfreid Anzinger, Alois Mosbacher, Huber Schmalix and I visited the church of Saint-Sulpice. It was there during the 1850s that Eugène Delacroix had painted three monumental murals depicting Jacob wrestling with the angel as the chief work of his final decade. The tree painters began a passionate dialogue out of which I caught the sentence about how extraordinary it was and what it actually takes to realize such a thing; to paint a life-sized mature tree in a church—“Nobody had done that before him—and look at how the leaves are painted!”

That’s exactly how it was twenty years later during the conversation with Khaled Benfred, but this Yme it was about Béatrice Dreux. It’s true what Benfred had seen. What makes these painYngs convincing is their underlying sureness and dynamic streak that conYnues from picture to picture and derives from a basic gesture, not from a style or concept. This dynamic streak can be found in all her painYngs, even in the unfinished or “failed” ones. Such painting functions through this energetic certitude, and Dreux seems to need “impossible” subjects in order to generate such tension in her working process. If it were to use formal approaches and subjects and participate quietly and politely in contemporary artistic discussion, such painting wouldn ́t even get off the ground. The Gypsy series, which also contained barely concealed approaches to self-portraits with an obsessiveness reminiscent of Cindy Sherman, already exhibited this combination of a seemingly unmanageable subject, an open, seemingly unfinished manner of painting, an occasional tightrope walk over kitsch in terms of coloraYon, and conspicuous sureness in total appearance. During a one-year stay in Paris this manner of painYng became more relaxed and confident. Especially in her choices of subject, Béatrice Dreux overcame the hidden rules about what art is supposed to deal with today. Yet the subjects still border on the “impossible”. To base works on Beuy’s Action with the coyote or to attempt landscapes appearing in Caspar David Friedrich’s oeuvre—in any art academy this will lead to a professor’s well-meant advice that one should drop such nonsense or risk going astray. But Béatrice Dreux doesn ́t go astray with these subjects. Starting precisely from this point of departure, a number of her recent paintings are a “success,” and as a result of her stay in Paris where she gained painting experience in the museums, she has entered a very personal discussion with important points of reference in the history of fine arts.

I remember one of Kahled Benfred’s remarks in particular: Many of Béatrice Dreux’ paintings are in a positive sense underdeveloped. She’s right when she saves important things for later and doesn’t try to force everything into her work now. For any artist it is of central importance not to exhaust oneself, but to conserve one ́s energy even while society permanently threatens to pull it out through posiYve or negaYve pressure. In every generation most artistic talents fall victim to this conflict and most become exhausted after fifteen of twenty years and end up taking posts falling under the fields of teaching, administraYon or graphics. In this respect the energy that emanates from the seemingly unfinished paintings of Béatrice Dreux follows a different principle, which Georges Bataille defined in his notion of expenditure: to uninhibitedly expend energy in order to conserve it, which is only possible when not adhering to norms. That is way these painings are fresh.

ON MEDEA

The painting is titled Medea. Arranged in large format, its height and width surpass the measures that a viewer can grasp. It shows a hieratic figure, rendered in profile, composed of nearly single-color areas, but which are modulated in themselves from one colored dot to the next. There is nothing naturalistic about the painting. The thoroughly colorful figure radiates an intensive energy. It is abstract at the same time, since it depicts nothing seen, but rather a vision, a vision of a strong female figure.

Most of the new pictures by Béatrice Dreux are large-scale, conceived solely through color, accordingly intensive, and at the same time painted exclusively with dots. As soon as you move closer to the pictures, this painting technique is just as surprising as it is obvious. This explains the energy potential these pictures develop. At first glance, one thinks of “Pointillism”, the direction in the Post-Impressionism of the last decades of the nineteenth century, in which Georges Seurat and his painter colleagues took the picture idea presented fifteen years earlier by the Impressionists, and with the intentional fragmentation of the painting into single dots of color both calmed and energetically charged the painting at the same time. This historical example may have played a role in Béatrice Dreux’s decision to develop the more recent pictures solely through homogeneously colored dots. At the same time, though, she inverts the dispositive of historical Pointillism. Instead of a dispersion of the color values on the painting surface, a juxtaposition of the prime colors of the color spectrum in a small space for the benefit of the optical mixture, there is a slightly shifted superimposition of pure-colored dots of the same or nearly the same color. In this way, a painting surface can be imbued with a distinctly different intensity in comparison with a gliding application, a smearing of paint on the canvas. In a diametrical opposition to Pointillism, Béatrice Dreux applies nearly the same color, altered only by the abrasion of the brush, but thus modulated, over broad sections of the canvas. This is a digital, haptic principle, which—without it being intentional—has much to do with the way we now type on touch screens and with the new relationship of seeing and touching that we are all experiencing and practicing in this new century. What especially distinguishes the new pictures by Béatrice Dreux, in addition to the individual—one could even say idiosyncratic—technique or on this basis, is the extreme intensity of the color and the same intensity of form that are expressed in these paintings. Without programmatically enunciating it, the artist quite directly confronts the new habits of seeing and touching in our age, in the medium of a wholly improvised painting without intermediate digital steps, from one color dot to the next, and without sketching.

Why is the painting called Medea, when Béatrice Dreux’s painting involves contemporary issues of this kind, the exploration of a new image concept in conjunction with the way these new image forms are dealt with today? The title appears not only on this painting. The artist also gave a number of paintings from different series in recent years the same title. Since the Romantic era and Eugène Delacroix’ painting of the same name from 1862, the figure from ancient Greek mythology is a synonym for an independent woman who acts autonomously. Béatrice Dreux does not “plan” her paintings. A Medea simply emerged from the painting process again and again in recent years. This expresses not only her own situation as a painter, still marginalized per se with respect to male colleagues, which is also palpable every day informally as well, but also the concomitant self-reflection on her own situation, which has made up the special power of work by important female artists since the 1970s in comparison with many male colleagues. What is also expressed is the courage to take on a timeless myth with extremely contemporary painting, and to realize both, the highly energetic painting and the Medea idea, parallel to one another on the same canvas.

This exhibition shows an overview of Béatrice Dreux’s painting from the last three years. It proves the vigor of this work which, although it takes place outside conventional art business, so to speak, is among the most fascinating painting oeuvres created in Austria and internationally. The dialogue of small and mid-sized format pictures with the large canvases plays as much a role in this as the dialogue with earlier work series, in which the application of paint conversely played a major role. In these paintings Béatrice Dreux proves to be the same extraordinary colorist as in the more recent pictures painted with dots. In both cases the viewer experiences an energy and an immediacy of color that is not to be found elsewhere. In this exhibition Béatrice Dreux demonstrates that painting, if it is understood in its historical depth and its potential intensity, is perhaps the most modern medium imaginable.
Translated by Travis Lehtonen

POLITICAL AND POETIC PAINTING

Most of the canvases in Béatrice Dreux’s studio are large. At first glance they seem to be too big for her attic studio, with its slanted windows. In relation to the body of the artist, though, they are fitting. It becomes apparent that Dreux has made the right decision in selecting this large scale for her work when one sees how she approaches her paintings. The large format is not intended to exaggerate the subjective gesture, as it was in the ostentatious, self-assured, masculine Art Informel, or in the days of the Junge Wilde. Making an impression is not the goal. The choice of a large format is clear given Dreux’s relationship to painting: recognition of a serious counterpart, equality, respect. This applies particularly in regard to women, animals and plants, frequent players and signifiers in Dreux’ idiosyncratic imagery.

Monkeys, butterflies and caterpillars, bats, a doe. Very different creatures of the fauna that Dreux takes as her subjects. I found the image of a bat (Self Portrait 2, 2010) unremittingly intriguing. It could have been taken from a textbook on natural history, with the purpose of illustrating the body of this small mammal as clearly as possible. Placed against a neutral background and entirely filling the picture, the animal is presented to the viewer frontally. The wings are spread wide, as wide as possible. The extended wings leave the torso and splayed legs uncovered, unprotected. Then the shock: in the velvety-looking body gapes a bright slit, the female sex. The breast bears a heart emblem reminiscent of folk art: colorful, ornamental, decorated with blood vessels that could also be coral. What an apparition: The monster and victim in one. Christ Crucified and Our Lady of Mercy. Vampire and tortured little creature. Exhibitionist and angel. Wings blown open, the angel is driven backward before the storm of history. And we have yet to mention the expression on its face (face?): two eyes opened wide, bared teeth in a gaping mouth.

Terrified or terrifying?

Each of my animal pictures, says Béatrice Dreux, is a self-portrait.

In the history of painting, women, animals and plants have often been painted small, reduced to pleasant motifs. Béatrice Dreux paints them large, both literally and figuratively. Interestingly, this approach is so unusual that it seems as though something monstrous is unfolding. Women and animals as monsters, as something alien, as alien as can be. They are not aggressive; they take far too little interest in their onlookers for that. Not even with their wide open eyes do they manage to make eye contact. In many pictures they are pitiably trapped in an eternal night. Béatrice Dreux gives them no space and no time. These paintings are nocturnes, but as they contain no hint, no hope that morning might ever dawn again, it is as though they are outside of time. They reveal nothing. They are not subject to any of the past decade's canonized paradigms of figurative painting: no references to film, photography, the mediated image, no narrative, no enigmatic riddling. The subjects are recognizable, identifiable; here are living beings, there the cosmos.

The night must become my element—Peter Handke.
Eyes, teeth, genitals. The woman. In Dreux’s work, the figure has long been synonymous with images of women. There is only one male painter who has painted female nudes in a comparable manner: Willem de Kooning. Of course, his women look different—fuller, for example; his painterly gesture is quite different. And yet there is a similarity in the way de Kooning reverently imbued women with something monstrous, paid them awed homage. With their oversized eyes, Dreux sets us on his trail. Dreux’s women often have outsized eyes, like those painted by de Kooning. Dreux’s women also almost always have eyes of unequal size (as in Picasso’s Jacqueline of 1960).

Sometimes one is bigger than the other, pushing the figure toward the pathological, the disfigured, but also giving a hint, a magnification of the woman as seer. Sometimes one eye is open and one closed. Sights set on both the inner and outer world. The poetic and the political must both be kept in view.

The mouths: pasted on, crooked, and once more oversized. They often resemble the earliest collages, fashioned from newspaper photographs a century ago. Sharp teeth. The nightmare vision of the vagina dentata. The open sex, which is in some pictures is expanded into an opened abdominal cavity. Caesarean section. Heavy breasts. Multiplied breasts as archaic fertility statues. The open sex presented as a wound. “A wound that you show,” said Joseph Beuys in the context of his sensational installation Show Your Wound, “can be cured.”

See: the mother. As a mother, the woman is invisible in society. Her only role is one of servitude, arduousness, tedium. No sociopolitical measures can significantly change that. Fertility, and thereby maternity, are central to Dreux’s representations of women—and it seems as though the women must endure this fertility as their unalterable fate. The child as such rarely appears. As in legend, however, it may appear in changeable form. Just as Dreux calls every animal painting a self-portrait, the child may take the form of a monkey (Zorinka and me, 2010). Standing upon a globe of its own, it holds watch over the sleeping woman. The mother is recumbent. In another painting the child is with her, one of the eeriest pictures (*Palestine Mother and Rabbit). Again it is the dark of night. The child is deathly pale and stiff as a corpse. The mother’s face a grimace. Yet, with its inquisitive interest in the scene, a very much alive rabbit offers hope of survival beyond the confines of this cosmic darkness.

Dreux often paints women reclining under the open night sky. They are relatives of the Sleeping Gypsy by Henri Rousseau—though there is no good lion to keep the sleeper company. The series is called Palestine Mothers, and addresses the double marginalization as a Palestinian and as a mother, speaks of immense hardship and distress. Sleeping, perhaps dreaming, two moons in the sky. Large and small moon: mother and child. Boundless vulnerability. I once read that the daughter of the writer and art historian John Berger, a supporter of Palestinian self-determination, raised a Palestinian flag over her vegetable garden. This gesture is the female counterpart to the call for a boycott of Israeli institutions, which Berger had joined. One might expect both approaches from Béatrice Dreux, the boycott and the flag. But it was when I read about the flag in the garden, not about the boycott, that Dreux’s Palestine Mothers sprung to mind. Bringing the war back home. Empathy is the refusal to leave others to their own devices, even when you do not know them and they are far away. Palestine Mother, the Goblin, 2011: Night, the crescent moon, a mountain range, as a base a sort of Keffiyeh—the “Palestinian scarf,” which repeatedly appears as an attribute of the women in this series—the woman lying stretched out on her back. On her breast the goblin, a monkey with glowing red eyes and bat ears. The representation references Henry Fuseli’s 1781 The Nightmare. The horse, forcing its way in from outside (the “mare”?), is missing—we are already outside, after all—though there is a tree stump at the woman's feet. Presumably the mighty roots of an olive tree.

There, the gloom of the nocturnes. And then here, the colorful—very colorful—paintings. These too feature depictions of women, yet in the color palette of an ice cream parlor: pistachio-green, sky blue, lemon yellow, light pink, medium pink, dark pink. Breasts become colorful balloons, the room dissolves into surfaces of multihued ornament. A flirtation with kitsch, with naiveté, with counterfeit joy? Might a camp attitude of this kind also underlie the Cosmic paintings, with their swirling depths of space, their mesmerizing formations of stars, planets, galaxies? Or does George Steiner point us in the right direction when he says: “In all substantial acts of art there beats a furious happiness”?

Of course, as an intelligent and well-trained painter Béatrice Dreux is not only interested in the issues she addresses, she also explores their formal and emotional potential. She measures her options against tradition, against the history of the pictures, not just against “important” painting. Especially given the “colorful” works, one cannot help but ask about the relationship to “Bad Painting,” defined thus by New York curator Marcia Tucker in 1978: “…an ironic title for ‘good painting,’ which is characterized by deformation of the figure, a mixture of art-historical and non-art resources, and fantastic and irreverent content. In its disregard for accurate representation and its rejection of conventional attitudes about art, ‘bad’ painting is at once funny and moving, and often scandalous in its scorn for the standards of good taste.” More than 30 years later, the “conventional attitudes about art” and “standards of good taste” have changed, of course, if not dissipated altogether. In their 2008 exhibition “Bad Painting—Good Art” in Vienna’s MUMOK, Viennese curators Eva Badura-Triska and Susanne Neuburger focused on “elements of irony, protest, trash, kitsch and shock.” One can discern such elements in Dreux's work; references to art history and citations of the great masters, as Dreux employs them, are also not unknown to bad or “malevolent” painting. Yet Béatrice Dreux’s position is no tongue-in-cheek, winking commentary on painting. When she references famous paintings—in addition to de Kooning, Picasso, and Fuseli, I was able to identify Edouard Manet and of course Egon Schiele, with his images of young women with open sex, and that is certainly not a complete list—there follows an intense and complex process in which Dreux appropriates art historical representations of women, charging them as signifiers of contemporary issues. Béatrice Dreux seeks and finds a fine line on which to work that is rewarding for painting and artist alike. The poetic and the political must both be kept in view.

MoMente dES ÜberGanGS — TieRchen und Insekten

Im aktuellen Universum von Béatrice Dreux herrscht ein wildes Gewusel und Gewaber, das jeden in seinen Bann zieht, der sich darauf einlässt. Viele der ausgestellten Werke heißen ‚Tierchen‘ oder haben das Wort ‚Spider’ in ihrem Titel. Und ja, es kreucht, fleucht und fliegt, es quakt und es wird vor allem gehuldigt: Die dargestellten Tiere sind keine einfachen Abbilder der Natur. Vielmehr wirken sie wie Trägerinnen archetypischer Gewalten. Das hängt einerseits mit den Größen der Formate zusammen, aber auch mit der Strahlkraft und Anordnung der Farben sowie dem Umgang mit dem Bildraum. Durch die Verwendung von Diminutiven wie ‚Tierchen‘ entsteht zunächst der Eindruck von Harmlosigkeit und Niedlichkeit, wie er stereotypisch gern auch in Bezug auf Frauen oder Mädchen erzeugt wird. Béatrice Dreux konterkariert jedoch bewusst diese Vorstellung, indem sie die ‚Tierchen‘, insbesondere die Spinnen als mächtige Königinnen, Muttergottheiten oder gar Totemfiguren darstellt, die auf die Betrachtenden energetisch wirken. So wie Schöpfung eines von Béatrice Dreux’ Themen ist, so ist es auch der Schöpfung Cousine, die Verwandlung, die Momente des Übergangs. Stilmittel, Motive und Sujets tauchen in ihrem Werk in adaptierter Form immer wieder auf und geben so eine neue Sicht auf ihre Themen aber auch auf ihr Medium, die Malerei.

Es tummeln sich weiße Spinnen auf blassblauen oder leuchtend rosa ins Orange kippenden Hintergründen, sowie mehrere schwarze Spinnen auf weißen oder bunten Hintergründen und eine rote Spinne, die aufgrund ihrer hochroten Farbe an weibliche Karminschildläuse denken lässt, die zur Gewinnung des selbigen Farbstoffes gebraucht werden. Neben den Großformaten gibt es auch noch weniger insektenhafte ‚Tierchen‘. Manche scheinen sich gerade in der Verwandlungsphase zu befinden, in der sie Merkmale unterschiedlicher Tierarten miteinander vereinen, wie jenes, das einerseits acht Beine hat, wie sie seine großformatigen Schwestern besitzen, anderseits einen Schnabel, wie Vögel oder tatsächlich Schnabeltiere. Diese kleinformatige Reihe der ‚Schnabeltiere‘ trägt den ‚Dreux’schen Kosmos‘ in sich – die farbigen Scheiben und Kreise, die sich regenbogenartig mit punktueller Maltechnik aus dem Zentrum ihrer Figur herausschälen. Eines dieser Tierchen möchte man als Erpel identifizieren: Nicht nur durch die spezifische Farbgebung – grüner Kopf und bräunliches Brustkleid – die ihn hier als männlichen Exoten, als Stockente ausweist, fällt er etwas, sogar sprichwörtlich aus dem Rahmen – er ist auf runder Leinwand gemalt –, mehr als die anderen, hat er eine Körperlichkeit. Er ist rücksichtig porträtiert. Das Tierchen reckt seinen Bürzel samt Anus auf herausfordernde und verführerische Weise
den Betrachtenden entgegen, als würde es sie einladen, ihm in den dunklen Kosmos zu folgen, dessen Zentrum er gleichzeitig zu sein scheint.

Wenn es Ganzkörperportraits der verschiedenen Tierchen – Spinnen und beschnabelten Tiere – gibt, dann auch solche, die im ‚Portrait‘ dargestellt sind: Nicht eindeutig identifizierbare Flugobjekte, Tierchen (Golden Minoan Insect), Tierchen (Minoan Princess) und Sunset Insect, die man nur dann als Flugobjekte wahrnehmen kann, wenn man die wunderbare Arbeit Mother and Daughter in Danger von 2021 kennt, in der zwei zartrosa Libellen-ähnliche Insekten mit blauvioletten Flügeln den ganzen Bildraum einnehmend nach rechts außen fliegen. Den Weg weist das Muttertier, unter dem die Gefahr, in Form einer Flamme, die Brenzligkeit der Situation andeutet. Dicht gefolgt von der Tochter, die dem Larvenstadium noch nahe ist. Wie dieses Mutter-Tochter-Gespann zusammengehört, zeigt auch Lonley inscet: Die Bildsprache von Mother and Daughter in Danger wird aufgenommen: Auf Béatrice Dreux’ typischem, vibrierendem schwarzen Hintergrund, der an machen Stellen klebrig, teerig scheint und an anderen in mattschwarze Fläche zieht und so eine verschlingende Tiefe erzeugt, fliegt ein einzelnes Insekt, ohne seine Flügel aufzuspannen oder aufspannen zu können durch die Weiten dieses Alls. Die schematischen Tropfen, die von jeher zum Formvokabular Béatrice Dreux’ gehören, beweinen und beregnen dieses einsame Wesen, gleichzeitig scheinen sie ihr Objekt zärtlich zu schützen und zu stützen.

Tierchen (Golden Minoan Insect) und Tierchen (Minoan Princess) kann man als Paar verstehen, da sie wie Yin und Yang die jeweilige Gegenposition einnehmen: Das Golden Minoan Insect fliegt mit goldfarbenem Körper auf dem schon bekannten klebrig schwarzen Hintergrund Richtung links, die kreisrunde, ins Pink kippende glimmernde Zunge oder Nase stößt beinahe an den Bildrand. Und man fühlt die Enge dieses Bildraumes, die Konzentriertheit dieses Seins. Das Pendant Minoan Princess fliegt mit gleicher Entschlossenheit rechts gegen den Bildraum. Es ist kosmisch-schwarz und ‚fliegt‘ auf goldenem Hintergrund. Über dem Auge geht eine violette gekringelte Linie ab, die Reminiszenz eines Fühlers. Der starke Kontrast von Gold und Schwarz erzielt einen Scherenschnitt-ähnlichen Effekt. Das Gold wirkt wie ausgeschnitten und aufgeklebt, was den Bildern eine gewisse Ornamentik verleiht und an byzantinische Ikonenmalerei erinnert. Eine weitere formale Gegenbewegung, die die beiden ‚Minoerinnen‘ zu einem schönen Paar machen, ist die Ausrichtung der bunten Dreux-Tropfen: Vertikalität und Horizontalität. So scheinen sie beim Goldenen Insekt eher zu fallen und verleihen dem gesamten Bild dadurch eine untrügliche Schwere. Bei der schwarzen Prinzessin hingegen scheinen sich die Tropfen beinahe aus ihrem Zentrum, Herzen, herauszudrehen, um dann in Flug- und Fluchtrichtung dieselbe Bahn wie die Prinzessin einzuschlagen. Ob dieses Insektenpaar auf den berühmten Bienenanhänger Die minoischen Bienen von Malia (zw. 1700 u. 1500 v.u.Z) – ein aus Gold gefertigter Anhänger mit zwei Bienen, die, einander gegenüberliegend, im Flug einen kreisrunden Honigtropfen tragen – verweist? Jedenfalls, wenn man sie als Paar betrachtet, scheinen sie Polaritäten und Wechselwirkungen von zwei grundlegenden, sich ergänzenden Kräften im Universum darzustellen. Und natürlich passen Bienen in Dreux’ Bildwelt, die mit mythologischen Bezügen spielt und sich immer wieder neu den Themen Mutterschaft, weibliche Heroinnen und Gottheiten widmet und mit demselben großen Interesse dem Tierlichen, nicht Humanen.

Sunset Insect, das die Formsprache der eben beschriebenen Minoerinnen aufnimmt, leitet uns zu den Spinnenwesen über – auch hier: Metamorphose –, denn einerseits ist Sunset Insect noch ein minoisches Flugobjekt, gleichzeitig trägt es schon in Übergröße das kreisrunde regenbogenfarbene, Pinseltupfer für Pinseltupfer gemalte Energiezentrum, das wir in abgeschwächter Form bei der Princess bereits vermuten durften.

Das führt uns zu den großen schwarzen Spinnen, die diese Ausstellung dominieren, die alle in einer oder einer anderen Form von diesem buntfarbigen, energetischen Kreis beseelt sind. Alle Spinnen sind so in den Bildraum gesetzt, dass sie das Format vollständig ausfüllen. Sie sitzen in ihren, ja, sie sind Besitzerinnen ihrer Bildwelten. Viele haben acht Beine, aber nicht alle. Jedoch haben alle dieses schematische Augenpaar, das in seiner Starrheit beinahe ein wenig herablassend, wenn nicht außerweltlich blickt. Interessant ist, dass die Spinnen in diesen Bildern auf perspektivisch unterschiedliche Weise gelesen werden können. Einerseits lassen sie sich als horizontal stehende Wesen deuten, auf deren Haupt je eine rote Krone sitzt, die den Hoheits- und Autoritätsaspekt verstärkt. Anderseits können die Spinnen in einer Draufsicht-Perspektive betrachtet werden, wodurch die Kronen wie geöffnete Mäuler mit spitzen Zähnen wirken, die gegen den Bildrand stoßen. Dieses Motiv kennen wir schon von den minoischen Insekten: das Gegen-den-Bildraum-Stoßen, -Aufbegehren. Die Ambivalenz in der Lesart der Spinnen erzeugt eine faszinierende Spannung zwischen Huldigungsgedanken und chaotischem Unbehagen, durch den Wechsel der Perspektive spielerisch auf die Formel gebracht. Formen der Verwandlung sind also nicht nur von einem Bild zum nächsten zu beobachten, sondern sind auch rein innerbildlich nachzuvollziehen. Verwandlung, oder wie man es hier konkret nennen müsste: Schöpfung, ist augenscheinlich Thema der Mother Spider. Eine schwarze Spinne sitzt vor flackernd braunem Hintergrund. Ihr ‚Kronenmund‘ ist nicht rot wie bei den anderen. Er ist weißlich und stellt formal eine Verbindung her zu den anderen Öffnungen ihres Leibes: Dem Augenweiß und der kreisrunden Fläche, die die ganze Aufmerksamkeit auf sich zieht. Dicht neben- und beinahe übereinander sitzen hier kleine Spinnenkinder zusammen in der Mutterhöhle, dem Kokon. Manche haben leuchtend blaue Augen, rote Münder, scheinen nur darauf zu warten in alle Richtungen auszuströmen, ein Bein, ein Pinselstrich – Malerei ist bei Dreux in all ihren Varianten vertreten. Sie schichtet Farbe, dass sie bald pastos auf der Leinwand sitzt, gleichzeitig lässt sie durch lasierendes Übermalen
darunterliegende Farbschichten durchscheinen. Die intuitive Malweise ist stets im Wandel und entwickelt ihre Haltung und Form im Prozess. Ähnlich wie ihre Sujets, die ebenfalls in ständiger Veränderung begriffen sind.

Béatrice Dreux’ Kunst kündet einerseits von einer strengen Archaik, anderseits kippt sie ins kindlich Verspielte, dieses Changieren zweier entgegengesetzter Pole verleiht ihrem Werk eine zeitlose Qualität. Sie schafft ein mythologisches Universum, in dem feminine, tierliche und mineralische Aspekte der Natur miteinander verquickt werden. In ihrer Auseinandersetzung mit dem Medium Malerei in so unterschiedlichen Facetten schafft Dreux eine vielschichtige und ausdrucksstarke Bildsprache, die immer wieder neue Perspektiven auf ihre Themen eröffnet.

INTERVIEW

Love Béatrice, are you the clever smart sorceress Medea?

Medea is for me a place of longing, a necessary utopia; but not the child murderer Medea of ​​Euripides, who has corrupted her story and so that all other interpretations drowned out. Like Christa Wolf. To Today, Medea, as a child murderer like Euripides, has become a collective Memory stated. I am interested in the Medea beyond the traditional ones Viewpoint, at the interface between matriarchy and partriarch. she is a Sorceress and a stranger who speaks a language that spans more than our alphabet.

Your work seems very unacademic. Are you aware of yours? Training or do you see yourself in the tradition of the Viennese school and its Fantastic Realism?

Unakademisch is a compliment, merci. The Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna was still in one when I was studying Slumber. With Arik Brauer it was, with a tiny brush for years, motifs how to copy St. Stephen’s Cathedral. When I landed Markus Prachensky I should pour, Spray with paint or draw the same root for a year. I couldnt do that really serious, and so I have to my heroes (Joseph Beuys, Wilhelm de Kooning, El Greco, Angolisola Sofonisba ...) in the library processed. That was great. We had a fantastic library there.

Parts of your painting often look like knitted patterns from a distance. Do you feel for yourself? a closeness to traditional folk art and its simplified symbolism?

Yes. Folk art and prehistoric art give me “innocence” in art back, far from the egomaniacal art postings on Instagram ... from this I can take “innocent art”, there is inexhaustible space for individuality. How beautiful can a triangle be, a circle, a star, and how complex a Merging these symbols! The great abstraction in many early peasant ones Art is fascinating, intelligent and crazy, an infinite fund. The mosaics off Pompey and the figurines of the Danubian civilization bear witness to a humanism that is Hard to find today.

When you speak of humanism, morality seems to have a factor in your work be! To what extent do you see your painting as a social statement? Or do these fragments serve “only” as an occasion to paint on them painterly?

Sociopolitical art is mostly very didactic. Joseph Beuys and Jean Luc Godard did a great job, but only because you Universe involves much more than a topic or content. One of your last works “Ein Aus Laut Leise” (ingenious work!) You could also read politically, but only “also”. Art is far from these criteria as content or topic. Ezra Pound is politically questionable, but artistically an unbelievable one Treasure. To fully engage with the color, the surface and the composition is also one Statement.

These are quite different role models, you call that! Do you think that the
Ideas by Joseph Beuys could be painted by a Wilhelm de Kooning?

No, I can not imagine that. And role models—that’s a difficult term—me rather have the impression of having to surround myself with “soul mate”. The heroes from the academy time are no longer so present. I try my head rather image-free to hold, and hantle me from one picture to the next.

Although God often appears in your work, I have the impression that you Kraken are just as important?

God, gods, monads—animated particles-irritate me in contrast to humans very. I love octopuses! Maybe we should not develop into cyborgs but towards Octopus people. Our IQ is falling rapidly, we urgently need a few self-destructive cells. An “orderly step backwards”, to the “ANIMAL KRAKENGOTT”.

On Spiritual power

The figures in Beatrice Dreux’s Octopussy series (2018) seem to be equipped with spiritual power. Their expressions are formed through differences within the black, only visible through certain angles with the right light shining on the paint. They resemble mythological creatures. Shiny, glittering dots adorn the multi-armed beings, confirming their female characteristics and giving them a contemporary look. Both ancient and present, both animal and humanlike, the octopussies come to us as portraits—even though they are not of specific people, but rather of “being” in a more abstract sense. Dreux would not explicitly call her work religious, yet her drive as an artist springs from an awareness that in our current world, something is missing in terms of belief or direction. In her case, art containing beauty, dynamics, and darkness occupies the void that has been left by the disappearance of shared religious experiences. As a painter, Dreux shows the courage to experiment, to work with motifs that could appear childlike or hint at clichés. Yet, through insistent work on motifs such as the rainbow or the octopus, the work gains layering and depth. From fragile or funny setups, they become powerful facts that speak for themselves and can be looked at for a long time. The work offers a connection to older wisdom in a fresh, current coat of paint. Dreux likes bold, expressive painting, and regards Georg Baselitz as one of her heroes. She seems like the right person to give his legacy a feminine twist and continuation.

Published in catalog Taking Root, KIT Düsseldorf, 2019

Notes on the paintings of Béatrice Dreux

Béatrice Dreux’ new paintings depict seascapes and cloudscapes that make reference to the landscape paintings of the Romantic period as well as to the atmospheric landscape photography of the 19th century. In addition, the artist takes on a pictorial representation of the art “Actions” perpetrated by Joseph Beuys during the 60s and 70s. This series is hence characterized by a reception of chronologically separate phases in art history, whose common feature is that the relation between rationality and emotionality within them was experienced as precarious and opposed; and that art was utilized as an alternative concept of interpretation as well as a model-like guide to overcoming the conflict. Both the on–sided logical–rational utilitarian thought of the early Enlightenment as criticized by the Romantics, and the opposition practiced by Beuys against contemporary understandings of science and politics, were based on social-historically motivated experiences of alienation, and the same time became the point of departure for assessing art as a reservoir of alternative strategies. With her reception of Beuys and Romanticism Dreux updates this battery of questions and consciously positions the emotional in a historically reflexive framework.

By interpreting the Actions of Beuys through painting Dreux quotes an artist who, with his consideration of the mythic-ritual and intuitive-emotional, had already had in mind a historically reflexive approach. “I don’t want to return to the magical or mythical world. Rather, I want to conduct historical analyses with these images, to make conscious an historical-analytical element.” (Beuys)¹ In his attempt to render visible and simultaneously bridgeable the subjectively perceived loss of unity of nature and mind, of intuition and rationality, Beuys turned against solely utility-oriented thought and action by incorporating archetypical, mythical and magical-religious contiguities. Nordic mythology, non-European worldviews, natural sciences as well as anthroposophic and religious-philosophical enquiries mark his oeuvre from the beginning.

Dreux clarifies the historically oriented and mythical–reflexive dimensions of her paintings by referencing one of the heroes of this topical field, who, because he was proceeding critically against a one–sided rationalist-logo-centric concept of progress, had to answer back to suspicions of regressive escapism: “It’s not about regression. The only thing to be considered is progression and the methodology with which one can advance progression. That’s what it´s about for me. (…) When I criticize through images both the concept of science in its necessarily reductionist character, and democracy as the present form of society, which developed parallel to each other, which according to their phenotypes appeared earlier and under other preconditions, I don’t wish to reject modern achievements but to get through them. I want to expand and enlarge by attempting to create a greater basis of understanding.” ²

It is precisely these “images” of critique of the contemporary concept of science and its democratic-political context that Dreux takes up as a motif in her paintings. Hence she painted the Fat Corner, a piece paradigmatic to Beuys’ concept of social sculpture, as well as some scenes from Actions in which Beuys surrounded himself with animals or animal carcasses in order to treat the loss of erstwhile human connectedness to nature of to offer perspectives on overcoming this loss. One of these paintings shows the dead hares bound to thin wooden sticks, which Beuys handled in the René Block gallery in Berlin during his action “Eurasia, 32nd movement of the Siberian Symphony” in 1963. The artist was turning against polarizations and schematizing categorizations in society, specifically against the cliché of rationally determined “Westerners” and supposedly vitalistic intuitive-acting “Easterners.” By mobilizing the dead hare as a symbol of creature-like earthboundedness and as an incarnation of human utopias, Beuys appealed for overcoming this polarizing demographic of mentalities.

Dreux also painted the action “I like America and America likes me” of May 1974 at the Rene Block gallery in New York, in which Beuys, swathed in felt and brandishing a staff, stayed in a gallery space for three days in order to establish a relationship with a coyote. For Beuys, the interaction with the animal “represents pre-Columbian America, which still knows the harmonic coexistence of man and nature in which the coyote and the lndian still live with each other, before they are both hunted by the colonizers.”³ With the choice of a herd animal that seeks the protection of the group when in danger, but otherwise leads the existence of a loner, Beuys alluded to the network of relations between the individual and society. Fifty copies of the Wall Street Journal scattered across the floor, on which the coyote urinated, rounded out the environment of this Action, which practiced in an intentionally archetypical way a critique of civilization with an alternatively accrued claim.

Dreux’ paintings portray these Actions, or some of their central sequences, in a painted choreography dominated by earthy dark colors. The dark, shrouded figure of Beuys appears as an apparition in the respective total scenarios of these pictures. With her reduction of color and the attempt to compositionally arrange clearly connected and cohesive scenes, Dreux refuses a talkative and expressive representational gesture and aims instead at a painted translation of Beuys’ intended search for lost unity and unification of rational and emotional components through conscious Actions reduced of deeds and events. Moreover, the monochrome coloration refers to a view of black and- white photographic and film sources on which the painter’s Beuys pictures center. Hence it becomes clear that the Actions that served as materials for the paintings had been already mediated and interpreted—whereby, last but not least, the artist alludes to the fact that every form of viewing and perceiving is an act of interpretation based on pregiven information.

Dreux’ reception of Romantic landscape painting is subject to pictorial concentration and clarification as well, whose historical filter, is again, photography. In black, brown of darkly restrained colors, these paintings allude to the atmospheric landscape motifs with their daybreaks and sunsets and mostly cloudy skies. Ephemeral dark fogs of color condense into dynamic cloudscapes; water and air seem to merge in dramatic sceneries of light. Occasionally, single birds or ships signal life amidst elemental forces of nature. These paintings show no detailed landscape surveys, but rather atmospheric sceneries in which endless vastness and immediate proximity appear in mysterious unity.

A ceaselessly repeated natural spectacle its thus comprehended through recourse to the landscape photography of Gustave Le Grays in particular, and the landscape paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, as a representational motif brought to focus by specific societal and art-historical conditions—thereby referencing the fundamental difference between the timelessness of nature and temporality of its pictorial representation. And yet, at the same time, these paintings show to what extent images themselves possess the power to seduce and emotionalize. Or, to put it another way, that one cannot avoid conferring the feelings experienced in the face of such atmospheric landscapes onto their images. Basically, the relation between landscapes and landscape depictions, between model and image, does not correspond to a distinct division, but rather to interplay. Strictly speaking, one does not perceive a landscape in unbroken authenticity, but rather as an already co-determined perceptual image. Hence, whether viewing landscapes or their images, there are no innocent eyes.

Let us briefly return to these medial representations as sources of inspiration for viewing landscapes: Because the fleetingness of passing clouds and surging waves made their depiction difficult, photographic-documentary renderings gained ever more importance as model studies for the painters of the 19th century. These natural motifs not only served as models for atmospheric paintings, but were also themselves the subjects of scientific investigation. The camera was seen along with the microscope and telescope as a guarantor of the increased objectivity and verifiability of visible things. “Actual observation experiences (…) a higher expansion. (…) It consist firstly in the use of an artificial apparatus to perfect the natural sense perceptions, above all the sense of sight. (…) Such apparatus help us toward a better assessment of a structure whose least perceptible details can, in various ways, attain the highest meaning.”⁴

Along with her own landscape photographs, Dreux has drawn on the history of this profession as a working basis and thereby harked back to Gustave Le Gray. In 1850, he created a series of ocean scenes that, because o their dramatic lighting effects and impressive images of waves, are among the most spectacular photographs of the 19th century. Le Gray, himself a former painter, could draw on the Romantic tradition of painting as co-founded by C. D. Friedrich and at the same time present his photographs as scientific-empirical documents, which were in turn used as models by realist and impressionist painters.⁵ His words document the importance of photography for painting, as an objectifying aid and model for studies. Yet we should not overlook the fact that contemporaries were already recognizing and relativizing the objectivity of photography as relational to its technical pre-conditions. The monochromatism of photography, for example, was seen as a fundamental deficit, which clearly contradicted the experience of reality. Through intentional alienation via black-and-white contrasts, Dreux quotes this monochromatism in her paintings and refers directly to technical reproduction of the natural and the role of imaging technology in the production of emotionally charged image contents. By utilizing photographs of nature as models for painting in a freely improvising manner, she alludes to the already artificially emblematic structure of these photographs and to their genuine non-identity with their model i.e. nature.

The seascapes and cloudscapes of C. D. Friedrich, likewise motivational in Dreux’ landscape paintings, stand for a Romantic understanding of nature, in whose scope the viewing of landscape as a projective motif of spiritual, religious and philosophical models of action and knowledge is always attended by a reflexively broken relationship to nature. “Doubtlessly, the 18th century is full of enthusiasts who imagine realizing an immediate relationship to nature through emotional abandonment. Critical contemporaries such as Schiller recognize that the discovery of nature in an empathic sense, natural nature, forms only the flipside of the loss of every immediate relation to nature, and that devotion to nature bears the traces of alienation from it.”⁶

Cartographic surveys and the calculation of nature and its processes from the smallest detail to the cosmic, as one of the central scientific-historical enterprises of the 18th century, required an ability to distance oneself from a reflexion-less understanding of nature. In the eyes of the Romantics, a rapprochement to nature could therefore only take place with a consciousness of this distance—a kind of rapprochement that Schiller termed “sentimentalist”. This view of nature—nature irrevocably lost in its nativeness—indeed already entails a nostalgic transfiguration citing again and again the transition from an agrarian civilization to an urban one, in order to qualify the gains in reflective and disassociative ability as the simultaneous loss of a supposes erstwhile unbroken participation in nature. The alienation from nature sensed by the Romantics as a condition of its sentimental recovery is therefore not simply a historical fact, but itself a Romantic topos that stylized the past into a conflict-free zone in order to describe a contemporary crisis.

That the domination of nature, its colonization, domestication and regimentation, did not hinder or preclude the Romantic-sentimental rapprochement to nature, but on the contrary provoked and forwarded it, is a central indication of the historical conditionality of the Romantic-emotional and of the relationality of intellectuality and emotionality. “The disjunction, the dissolution of the immediate connection with nature, makes possible the domination of nature, and is at the same time the origin of its sentimental discovery. Nature is the alien, the Other of reason.”⁷

C.D. Friedrich, whose “Wanderer Above The Sea of Fog” Dreux interprets in black-and-white, was known as a figurehead of “sentimentalist” Romanticism. The history of his reception is loaded with the diametrical claims of both religious and ideological-political didacticism or a natural-mystic early-Romantic history of ideas.⁸ Yet, with its plurality of interpretations, it bespeaks within the work itself a potential of meaning with complex references to motifs and history that should prevent us from seeing in Friedrich merely a naively sentimental “feeling” painter. His sharp criticisms of Nazarene painting, of its depictions of Maria and Jesus, as “something contrarious, indeed sometimes disgusting”⁹ , which he also denounced as false mimicry of bygone religiosity; his refusal to accept a tenured professorship at the Dresden art Academy; his friendship with Ernst Moritz Arndt and Friedrich Schleiermacher, who as “demagogues” stood under political surveillance; as well as his use of the demagogue costume as a motif in his paintings long after it had been banned: all attest to his standing as a critical coeval for whom the emotional was not an antipole to critical reason, but a part of it.¹⁰

Yet Dreux’ reception of Friedrich and Beuys also reveals the tradition of the romantic artist image, without itself lapsing into it: If for Friedrich, taking his cues from Schleiermacher, religion was not based on established church dogmas, but on the “views and feelings of the individual,” then “everyone is a potential priest,”¹¹ and consequentially, the actual religious intermediaries are in particular artists who are able to portray these feelings. It is this tradition of Romantic self-empowerment of the individual as a knowledge—capable and knowledge-mediating being with priestly entitlement in which Beuys still stands in his role as apologist and harbinger of life as social sculpture—in the framework of which every creatively thing and acting person is also him/herself an artist.

The person and art of Friedrich also serves to remind us that the conception of nature as myth and as alternative field of projection in connection with the Romantic critique of rationality is not simply a sign of apolitical, quixotic escapism, but itself expression of a collective societal self-understanding. “Myth presupposes a specific receptiveness on the part of participants that has nothing to do with a ‘childish’ or ‘natural’ state of humanity, but everything to do with tacit societal consent. Its participants grant validity to a myth because and insofar as it is commensurate with their collectively defined interests.”¹² Therefore, “the flourishing of mythical world-views in enlightened times (…) is never a simple regression or reaction: it points to the inability of the states to satisfy their citizens’ demands for rationale.”¹³

To account for the connotations of myth and its conceptual history as society-forming and -relevant phenomena means to not simply codify the relation between rationality and myth as opposite, but to consider it as a reciprocally illuminative, relational structure. “Mythical past and rationality have (…) not slipped into insurmountable opposition, but refer to each other. And the subject´s work lies precisely in establishing this relationship.¹⁴ Writing about the Romantic Gottfried Herder, Peter Bürger was referring to a tradition of interpretation that can also be considered as sustainable perspective for the current handling of the myth-rationality relationship. “If it is true that the opposition of rationality and myth pertains to a central problem of modern (capitalist and socialist) societies, then we will not be able to expect to find a ´solution.´ We should rather be looking for something else, which one could call a way of dealing with the problem.”¹⁵

The works of Dreux find one way of dealing with this relational problem—without exhausting or sufficing themselves in it—by recalling the integration of mythical tradition in the respective contemporary discourses of Romantic landscape painting and the artistic practice of Beuys. Yet Dreux’ art also differs from its models, precisely insofar as it makes reference to them. The religious intentions of Friedrich and the social-utopian endeavors of Beuys belong to different bygone worlds. They are quoted as points of departure, but are not imitated or simply updated. The condition and consequence of every type of reception is not identity with models, but their interpretation with fundamentally unforeseeable results from an insurmountable distance. Similar to how concepts are not yet the conceived, the image of a landscape is not identical to the landscape itself, but is its very interpretation in the context of specific tradition or innovations enmeshed in complex relational way in its perception.

Dreux the painter investigates the mythical and emotional in a historically conscious approach by interpreting art whose emotion-related contents are also connected to a reflexion on the societal functions of art. It is painting that deals with the historicity and the conditions of representation of the emotional, thus also with the rationality of feelings—consequentially, without itself repressing emotionality of from the outset denying or stigmatizing it.
Translated by Travis Lehtonen

New works by Béatrice Dreux

“The wine that one drinks with one’s eyes, the moon pours down in waves at night.” says the poem “Mondestrunken” from the cycle “Pierrot Lunaire”—made famous by Arnold Schönberg’s setting from 1912. Mondestrunken—a word that also comes to mind when considering the new works by Béatrice Dreux as part of the exhibition” A red blood moon, black tears cries, sometimes in front of a blue background, sometimes in front of a cosmic night that dies in deep black Abyss of infinity indicated.,,Desires horrible and sweet, without number they swim through
floods!”

Accompanying this moon-moon conjunction is The Rain Painting, in which the tears turn to drops. Various shades of blue evoke a night sky and a zoomorphic structure is reminiscent of the Octopussy series from a somewhat previous creative phase—just as in the artist’s entire oeuvre motifs repeatedly merge, are superimposed or disappear, only to reappear elsewhere in a different form and with a newly charged aesthetic urgency. Béatrice Dreux does not work with the means of painterly mimesis, but prefers stylized, reduced forms that often shrink to fragments and radiate the aura of archetypes. In this way, her paintings acquire a timeless appearance, settling in a certain way in a hallucinatory space of contingency, in which glitter and stardust beguile as additional eye stimuli.

What is particularly fascinating about the artist’s works is an inner radiance that seems to penetrate through the pores of the canvas and endows the pictures with an almost sacred luminescence. This ectoplasmic glow, created by a complex painterly layered aesthetic and punctualistic practice, reminds one of Emmanuel Lévinas’ philosophy of foreignness, which culminates in an ’invocation of the other’ and which in the art of Béatrice Dreux receives a phantasmatic visual echo chamber. As Levinas put it in “Totality and Infinity”, it is about an imageless seeing beyond language and cognitive recognition, which conveys an inkling of the truth in the experience of not knowing: “Such a situation is the radiance of exteriority or the transcendence in the face of the other.” A radiance of colors and figurations also characterizes the artist’s works, in which tears that dissolve the body’s boundaries, raindrops that knock on the existential window and the moon as a feminine, cosmic force create fascinating morganatic relationships “You nocturnal terminally ill moon. There on the black puddle of heaven. Your look, so feverishly oversized, Spellbinds me like strange melody.”