From Art in America January 1992
"Jeffrey Beauchamp at Susan Cummins"
Review by Bill Berkson
Jeffrey Beauchamp is a 27-year-old painter from New Jersey. He started out as a graphic artist and film animator and turned to painting landscapes three years ago while an undergraduate at the San Francisco Art Institute. This was his first solo show. One thing his landscape pictures express is a fascination with a Euro-American art form that could be identified fondly as Old Brown Painting. That is, the pictures make you consider the odd assortment of epoch-making talent and specialty acts that dramatic, chiaroscuro-based nature painting has borne along its 500-year spillway since the High Renaissance - Leonardo together with Rembrandt, say, or Corot and Ryder, and then Arthur Rackham, Maxfield Parrish and (for the caramel gleams of their enchanted-forest sequences) the 1940s Disney animators.
Beauchamp, for his part, doesn't comment on this flow so much as dive in imagination-first to find his own fresh impetus within it. He's a natural painter, and thus his reliance so far is on his own instinct for the peculiarities that a developed genre's givens can convey; the mixture of dereliction and hope evoked by sunlight glimpsed through wrenching marine clouds (The Hellespont), or something pending at the edges of an otherwise restful glade (The Decision). His teeming skies and semideranged foliage may be, as he says, pulled from his head, but they also come from the objective repertory of painterly means outside him, and sometimes refer recognizably to the life of the California coast near Fairfax, where he lives.
Beauchamp is a naturalist for whom every twist of cloud or leaf is potentially magical. His images are spooked. Nature is a blandishing, sly impersonator, and all textures signify theatrically. The action, set mostly against summery heats and shades, radiates from the middle distance. There's a sense of some things turning to catch the light and of others cryptically burrowing (usually around the lower third of the canvas) to avoid it. Daylight is cast as a relief from chthonic tensions, but it's also a device for searching out those tensions amid the literal and metaphysical darkness of the pictures' other major forms.
It's hard to stay more than a couple of feet away from the surfaces of these medium-sized paintings, so thoroughly does Beauchamp pack his spaces with clues to tease out the viewer's tolerance for anecdotal reverie. Under close inspection the merest daub can detain the eye into suspecting some untoward event or, at any rate, into noticing some unsettling instance of exotica tossed upon familiar ground. In Chaleur Park, two shade trees framing a gaseous incandescence have rough-hewn profiles the likes of which might be found in the famous monster grove at Bomarzo. Beauchamp's private grotesquerie carries more than a whiff of the sinister. The incredible roses in
Rose Portal resemble giant, loosely bunched, mutant grapes; one of them, blown from the arbor to lie at the base of a megalithic throne, looks bloodied, like the skull hidden in the bushes of Brueghel's Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (the Brussels version).
Among contemporaries, Beauchamp's nearest precedent would be Odd Nerdrum. They both work in a key of disturbance and enigma when lushly depicting bare reaches of the physical world. Yet Beauchamp isn't up for salvaging the epic dignities of humanism at large. He seems bent instead on keeping alive the remaining fraction of consciousness that can read the imprints of nature as somehow needfully analogous to our purposes and fears. Though his places are ostensibly unpeopled, they bear the proof of being looked at with human eyes.