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murmurART

New showroom, work from 20 artists inc Adam Thompson, David A Smith, Adam Bainbridge, Gareth Cadwallader showing upstairs 20 Hoxton Sq now
Review Jan 21 2010 « | »
John Beard's new portraits at Fine Art Society John Beard's haunting portraits of female icons on show at Fine Art Society, Piccadilly.

Brinda Roy

Tonight I saw portraits of women I wasn't very sure I was actually looking at.

Simplistic, even reductive though it may seem to compare the characters populating John Beard's arresting monochromatic depictions of famous women through the ages to unreal and ghostly presences, to me his works have a peculiarly spectral quality about them where his subjects seemingly straddle simultaneous states of presence and absence, being and non-being.

Although this sounds like a rather negative approach for a portraitist to take towards his subject, what Beard does is far more interesting than merely replicating a likeness. Rather, he seems to have extracted the very essence of his chosen icons- Marilyn, Marlene and Jackie, Woolf, Stein and Kahlo, Venus, Mona Lisa and Olympia, icons in life and in imagery- and rendered them in a manner in which they seem to emerge and fade onto the surface even as you stand looking at them. These images tease and tantalize you, they grab your gaze and force you to search the surface until you suddenly realize who you're looking at, and it seems blindingly obvious. But then you blink, perhaps, and it's gone again.

Beard uses muted chiaroscuro to achieve this effect- in many cases, the skin tone of the subject is barely indistinguishable from the background- and his medium of wax and oil on linen give the paintings a scratchier, more textured surface. The overall effect is that of early newspaper photographs, and I'm reminded of Walter Sickert's use of press photography as the framework for his later portraits of the nineteen twenties.

In a way, Beard is doing the same thing- his works are renditions of known images of these women, images that figure prominently in the public popular consciousness. This is what led me to think of his as painting the essence, rather than the likeness of his subjects. His likenesses are visually difficult to perceive, but by reworking a known image, he capitalizes on the strong cultural presence of his subject, using only a few key markers and our own pre-existing knowledge of these women to make their identities apparent to us. But he plays around and undercuts this tendency as well. His works are all extreme close ups of his subjects, focusing only upwards of the shoulders, and by stripping iconic images like Manet's Olympia and Botticelli's Venus of the rest of the painting, it's like looking at the originals from an entirely different and new perspective.

These works have a wonderfully haunting beauty about them, and at a time when my eyes tend to slide all too casually across a canvas, they challenge and exercise my vision and extend my perception. Trite as it may sound, I feel genuinely richer for having seen them.

John Beard's 'Paintings' at the Fine Art Society, 148 New Bond Street, W1, will run until 8th February.

Flo Wales Bonner

The gallery underground at the Fine Art Society feels a bit like a hospital corridor. White, shiny and sterile. Slightly claustrophobic. Set against this backdrop, John Beard's paintings are all the more striking in their blackness.

The canvases, uniform in size, precisely aligned, look like darkened windows behind whose panes barely discernible forms lurk and linger. And, like looking through a window to the outdoors at night, it takes a while for my eyes to adjust as I squint at a canvas. A nose emerges from the gloom. Two shadows become eye sockets. And, all of a sudden, the smoky ghost of Marilyn Monroe hovers there, like an image on a developing photograph just beginning to materialize from the chemical ether.

Studying John Beard's paintings is amusing, like playing a macabre game of hide and seek. Reconciling the name typed beneath the canvas with the murky happening above requires concentration; locating those famous features (step back and you can see more clearly - Marlene Dietrich's face falls into place like a jigsaw puzzle) is undeniably satisfying.

But at the same time viewing the paintings makes me uncomfortable. Their shadowy subjects, at once familiar and foreign in their colourlessness, their lack of animation, bring to mind those accidental faces that appear at the edges of old photographs, blurred and nameless, that both solicit and refuse identification. They haunt, they tease, but ultimately they hold back, steadfastly remaining in the darkness.

The enigmatic smile of Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring floats, in Beard's incarnation, like an afterimage on a TV set, faded, hollow, tragic. Virginia Woolf's aquiline profile is a smudge of ashes. The ivory skin of Manet's Olympia is tarnished, barely glimmering from within the ink darkness of the frame.

There is something sad about these charred mugshots. To me they speak of a Benjaminian decayed aura, of loss, of death. These iconic women, ranging from Frida Kahlo to Queen Nefertiti, exist here as burned-out phantoms, smudged prints made with printing blocks irrevocably damaged through overuse.

Walking through the exhibition I find it easy to overlook certain faces. If anything, this adds to the experience, the gnawing feeling of alienation that looking at John Beard's work brings about. These half-seen countenances, that pull away from the viewer into dark recesses of time and space, converge to create a sort of anti-exhibition that is simultaneously intriguing and dislocating - I found it strangely dissatisfying.

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