By Helen Miller

Beaux Mendes’ work piques the same interest in us as our information-hunger, set loose from any hope of a ground truth, and the endless searching this provokes.

Beaux Mendes, The Manzanita Loop at the Miguel Abreu Gallery, 88 Eldridge Street, NYC, through November 9.

Beaux Mendes, Untitled, 2024. Oil and mixed media on half chalk ground on linen. Courtesy of the artist and Miguel Abreu Gallery. Photo: Stephen Faught

Just when you thought Cezanne’s legacy couldn’t become anymore interesting, or S&M for that matter, Beaux Mendes wraps tree trunks in ribbons and unfurls twenty-five enchanting paintings ‘neo-en-plein-air’ in their second solo show, The Manzanita Loop, at Miguel Abreu Gallery through November 9.

Mendes studied at UCLA and Bard, as well as the Art Students League of New York, which is known for its atelier style training in traditional techniques. In the latest chapter of their hybrid practice bridging the studio and the woods, Mendes depicts the distinctive trees of the Manzanita Mountains, part of the Angeles Forest, in seasonal extremes — from the depths of winter to the peak heat of summer.

Beaux Mendes, Untitled, 2024. CNC routed live edge Purpleheart wood. Courtesy the artist and Miguel Abreu Gallery. Photo: Stephen Faught

These polarities elegantly undergird other pairings in Mendes’ show. In a single row of paintings across two high-ceilinged galleries and an adjacent hallway, moody browns alternate with luminescent grounds. One painting resembles another painting inside out. Unpainted passages of panel and pristine layers of half chalk ground on canvas, linen, and muslin appear like sun on wood.

The influence of Cezanne’s jewel-like watercolors is apparent in Mendes’ translucent layers of oil paint. In compact compositions, they manage to create space. On one large wood panel, a tree-like figure grows in all four cardinal directions. Its gnarled and knotty center harbors faces in a pareidolic fashion. Washes of wood stain lend a yellow glow and darken charcoal marks. Depending on how you look at it, clitoral, vulvar shapes appear to fan into a rather magnificent upside-down cone headdress.

A single painting on the central wall has the energy of an altarpiece. It is the largest painting in the show at 37 ¼ x 54 ½ inches, in oil and mixed media on half chalk ground on linen. It appears to depict the ribbon-wrapped specimen in the photograph featured on the exhibition postcard. In the top right and left quadrants of the painting, the adorned branches’ ligamentous gestures evoke a wrenched chicken bone. Their gaping bark recalls famous anatomical illustrations such as “Muscles of the Back: Partial Dissection of a Seated Woman,” a 1746 mezzotint by Jacques-Fabien Gautier d’Agoty, in which the rib cage of a ruddy, very-much-alive young woman springs open like a loosened corset.

Mendes’ boxy framing might be a fanciful illustration of stolen pleasures on the brink of climate breakdown. The balanced cropping indicates an innocent view, but the work comes off as subversive. A wolf den or dark womb located at the bottom of several paintings can be identified, after repeated looks, as the head of a fallen, foreshortened figure at the base of a tree. The boundary between the figure’s legs and the tree’s sprawling branches is indecipherable. They may be in motion. Each tumultuous picture in this series is painted in a dense-wood fall palette. In the smallest, only 12 x 12 inches, an excess of oil or turpentine, or something painted on the backside of the goatskin parchment, creates a beautiful bruised effect.

The more you look at these works, the more amorphously suggestive they become. The mandate here is not to see what is, as with traditional representation, or even to represent what is seen, as with impressionism, but to see what isn’t, or what might be, or what could possibly be obscene. In another sumptuously muddy piece from 2020, someone’s thighs (or multiple peoples’ thighs) energetically crawl up the painting (or bed, or rock face). In a more graphic, if tidy work from 2024, the view shifts upwards. One side-lying figure, outlined in the quick contour line of many 19th and 20th century nudes, mauve-purple and peachy knees raised, is definitely (or probably, or maybe not) having sex with the other, who is possibly a fox.

2024’s David Copperfield: The Disappearing Man, a distemper painting on linen, is the second largest and only titled work in the show. On first impression, it seems to be the most straightforward and cohesive as well. On closer look, however, we remember that Copperfield was a magician best known for his disappearing act. Here we find a version of him who, across the expanse of the canvas, appears to become less — or more — than human. Each manifestation of him is vaguer than the last, before the anthropomorphic shape disappears entirely into the blue-gray night.

Beaux Mendes, Untitled, 2024. Wood stain and charcoal on panel. Courtesy the artist and Miguel Abreu Gallery. Photo: Stephen Faught

Meanwhile, a gorgeous relief in CNC-routed Purpleheart wood repeats the form of an earlier piece composed of CNC-routed MDF covered in sheepskin parchment. The slick surface of the latter is as arresting as the exposed wood in the former. Both were made from materials associated with the land — from trees and sheep — and resemble that land. Both pieces play with scale — a kind of Bonsai effect — calling to mind snow-covered hills and a contour map. The precise, if unfamiliar shapes remind us that CNC stands for Computer Numerical Control and means that preprogrammed computer software directed these machined cuts.

Sooner or later the profile view of a face appears amidst the tree rings in the Purpleheart relief,  rendering them contour lines of a cheek, chin, and forehead, further complicating the tools and techniques at play. Upon reflection, the same profile can be seen in the sheepskin covered MDF, or medium-density fibreboard — even without the benefit of contour lines, and thanks, in part, to shadows and creases where the off-white material has been pulled around the back of the board.

I can’t stop thinking about the exhibition’s centerpiece, its image of a two-part trunk wrapped in ribbons resembling plastic trail markers. The branches in the painting brace like bent wrists or arched backs (relatively flat, formless, genderless, wonderfully indistinct places on the body, which make a regular appearance in this show). The half chalk ground (part linseed oil, part reconstituted animal hide) glistens; each thing is one thing and another. Brushstrokes, wiped and clotted, of flesh pink, fresh red, and bloody brown have been applied at expert angles. The implication is that of a perpetual wrapping and unwrapping. I’m reminded of the undulating, overlapping torsos of dancers in Meurtrière (2019) from “The Bare Life” sequence of films by Philippe Grandrieux — their desirous transformations, which crest over and over again, but never climax.

Beaux Mendes, Untitled, 2024. Oil on goatskin parchment. Courtesy the artist and Miguel Abreu Gallery. Photo: Stephen Faught

In his essay on Cezanne’s celebrated paintings of outsized bathers, titled “Freud’s Cezanne” (1995), T. J. Clark describes  “transparent” and “double figures” with buttocks and shoulders that keep turning into one another. He argues that the indeterminacy of what we might call “embodiment” disrupted and propelled Cezanne’s determination to capture his empirical impressions once and for all. Yet, each stroke inevitably fell short of exactly conveying the painter’s vision, as it remained stubbornly infused with his other senses, thoughts, imagination, empathy, and famous doubt.

While believing that something approaching truth could be arrived at through sensory experience, Cezanne was in fact demonstrating otherwise, unintentionally generating alternatives to a dogmatic positivism. Mendes takes up just such a non-instrumental view in the second to last painting of The Manzanita Loop — a screensaver of simple arches endlessly inscribed against an emerald green backdrop. At first, this gem of a painting didn’t hold my attention, as it is anything but embodied; but then the time between internet searches that it represents started to feel like the territory of the show I had just traversed. Mendes’ work piques the same interest in us as our information-hunger, set loose from any hope of a ground truth, and the endless searching this provokes.

Helen Miller is an artist. She teaches at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and Harvard Summer School.