Dennis Beach

Dennis Beach’s work occupies an unusual space between op painting and minimalist sculpture; poles which some would consider to be mutually exclusive. Op was an art dedicated to the eye exclusively. The “film color” effect that David Katz described in The World of Colour perhaps most accurately evinces the Op artist’s objective: To transform painted color into pure sensation; to make it appear as a veil that floats in an indeterminate place between the picture surface and the eye of the viewer. This desire for the immaterial is in direct opposition to the obdurate, serialized materiality of the minimalists; artists who prized literal, physical presence and disdained the hocus-pocus of illusionism. They harbored even greater mistrust for the seductive and subjective – qualities so wholly espoused by color in painting. So how does Beach bridge these two opposing views, both practically and theoretically? While being a self-professed admirer of both camps, he is effectively loyal to neither in his actual studio practice. Beach courts two things conspicuously absent in the discourse surrounding op and minimalism: beauty and a strong affinity for nature.

Beauty is one of the most troublesome issues in the art of the last 100-plus years; during the modernist period it was viewed with a mistrust that bordered on derision. To be seductive was to be shallow and without challenge to the viewer; a truly advanced art, in the minds of many of the artists and writers in the 20th century, would ask hard questions about taste and the comfort zone that resided within it. The minimalists pursued this to the point of mania, sometimes creating art that often seemed to have an adversarial relationship with its audience. Many of the op painters took up this line by making pictures that were literally painful to look at. Beach, on the other hand, effectively rejects the work of art as a kind of argument with the viewer - his unapologetically beautiful curves, graceful forms, and lush colors seduce, but very importantly, they never patronize.

The reason is simple enough; the artist himself is held in the thrall of the poetics of beauty. His keen understanding of color, unerring craftsmanship, and the lessons learned from the minimalists about distillation of form allows him to express beauty with a frankness and candor that borders on innocence, even though the artist himself is no naif. His process of paring down and repeating is analogous to that of the minimalists in the sense that it seeks out basic forms, structures, and rhythms, but diverges widely in that it simultaneously seeks out the most basic expression of beauty. In Beach’s work, geometry is not an empty vessel employed as a blunt messenger for color information or a transparent announcement of its constituent materials, it seeks to depict a streamlined expression of the underlying beauty of the biomorphic and elemental structures of the natural world.

This keen interest in nature connects his work to two other groups of artists that might not seem to relate at first glance to Beach’s body of work. The Venetians were artists that shared the Florentine’s strong desire for naturalism, but did so not via the diligently practiced drawing of Michelangelo and Leonardo, but through the carefully observed depiction of color and light. This particular objective was elaborated four centuries later by the impressionists and by Cezanne. Beach uses many of the primaries and secondaries so loved by the op painters but employs them in a manner more in keeping with the Venetians and especially with the late 19th century French painters – in Beach’s painting and sculpture, colors conjure light reflected off of or refracted through water or clouds. It speaks about rainbows and sunsets. The piece that perhaps most vividly expresses this aspect of Beach’s work, and consequently shows his divergence from op and minimalism, is Flow (1995-2015) which uses no paint or wood at all. Confined within clear tubes arranged with the unswerving geometry of plumbing is rushing water. The visual aspect with all its attendant connotations is augmented by the auditory – the whoosh or rivers and creeks and rain. The play of light is not depicted or illusionary, it is the actual dance and sparkle that light creates on water in motion. This simple but heartfelt homage to the forces of nature, made to conform to the materials and concerns of the abstract artist is perhaps the most straightforward summary of Beach’s practice, and more importantly, the kind of emotional content he is trying to call up through it.

Dennis Beach studied at the Maryland Institute College of Art; Baltimore, MD and has an MFA from the University of Delaware; Newark, DE. He has had solo exhibitions at Delaware Center for Contemporary Art, Wilmington, DE, Schmidt/Dean Gallery, Philadelphia, PA, Montgomery College, Takoma Park, MD, amongst others, and has been in numerous group shows trough out the US, notably at Schmidt Dean Gallery, Philadelphia, PA, Delaware Art Museum; Wilmington, DE, and Pepco Edison Place Gallery; Washington, DC. He works and lives in Wilmington, Delaware.