Beaux Mendes

Beaux Mendes (b.1987, New York, lives and works in Los Angeles) 

Beaux Mendes is both a painter and a pilgrim, whose practice sees them visit remote, often obscure sites to work on their canvases en plein air. Place, in these images, is not so much depicted as channelled, first through the artist’s mind and body, and then through their pigment as it meets the support. Mendes has said, ‘My paintings contain a double negative: the surface works to undo itself and representation is obscured to reveal a subject that is not an image of the past, but an impression directly inscribed in it.’ What is captured here is an encounter with location, in which spatial and temporal boundaries are dissolved in the artist’s restless paint