Erik Beehn: Flower + Line + Cloud

Erik Beehn, installation view from Flower + Line + Cloud. Image courtesy the artist.

Erik Beehn, Flower + Line + Cloud at Savidan Gallery, Las Vegas. Through July 23, 2022

by D.K. Sole

When Erik Beehn wrote about this exhibition on his Instagram feed he connected it to the desert around Las Vegas. “I don’t recall the exact moment when I realized how much I missed the desert. The sky, the light, the colors and overall breadth of space. … I missed the desert rain, the sunsets and being surrounded by mountains in every direction. It’s a special place to be.” I read those words after I’d seen the show. Then, as I thought back, new relationships began to form between the works, with some coming forward and others receding. The motif that looked like blue lines on notepaper formed a relationship with the squares of bursting flowers. I thought of the pale notepaper lines as the desert: a bleached steadiness, capable of extending forever unless it meets an artificial ending like the one at the edge of the paper. Lines on actual notepads, if I considered them in the right way, could be infused with the eternity of the Mojave.

Beehn had created interruptions to these lines, laying Albers squares over them and introducing areas where they bent as if the imaginary notepaper had been crumpled. The creases were convincing, but when I looked at the pieces from the side the paper was absolutely flat. When I moved back to the front view my l’oeil was tromped all over again. A mirage. The petals of Beehn’s flowers were made from thick drags of color, jutting upwards like marshmallows out of the frame-shapes that were trying to constrain them, a contrast to the pale, dissolving flowers he had exhibited at CSN in 2019. That exhibition, Are We There Yet?, had been built around the destruction of white bouquets. He used solvent on them and they bled. Now that I was thinking of the desert I compared those runny blots to the Mojave itself: an overwhelming thereness that flows open when you try to approach it. These new fat petals had successfully scaled down their ambitions and decided to represent the desert flowers that burst into a seasonal bloom and blast colour into the tan landscape. Or maybe (since I was thinking of Las Vegas as well) I could argue that they were like casinos. Anyway, they were overt; they were throwing themselves outwards while the lines lay still; they were actually three-dimensional while the mirage crumple-lines were not: a contrast, two movements, two experiments, the artist sketching out possibilities. “I could do this or I could do this ...”

I should say now that I spoke to Beehn about a week after I had written the last paragraph and he mentioned Las Vegas hotels as an absolute influence on the flowers; he also referred (without me prompting him) to the experience of seeing fields of flowers appearing in the desert. That was disconcerting. I didn’t expect my imaginative fantasy to be so accurate.

He did not, however, say anything about the notepaper lines representing the desert, so that is still a fantasy.

Erik Beehn, installation view, Flower + Line + Cloud. Image courtesy the artist.

He also said that the Albers squares that appear throughout the show were inspired by the sight of mis-aligned paint colour samples – I think that’s what he said? These squares lie around and over the two motifs, making gestures towards constraining them, but art – or paint – according to the argument I’m imagining in this show, can’t corral, limit, or describe the desert. Those regular geometries, created in an atmosphere of classroom order, with an urban vision of calm, have only limited power here. I could read it like this: the artist is telling me that in spite of his high degree of skill, his experience as a master printmaker, his years at Gemini G.E.L., his multiple methods of attack, his inventiveness, his willingness to destroy the perfection of his shapes by including blots, marks, and scratches, all of it is ultimately inadequate and all he can do is gesture towards his desire to bring “The sky, the light, the colors and overall breadth of space” into his artwork somehow. But I’m also aware that he is doing this deliberately, he is taking some pleasure in the accuracy with which he can describe failure. His quest for failure is a success. We are in the long tail of the art world’s response to modernists who thought, or hoped, that material really could create a kind of truth, if it was handled the right way. The invocation of the desert becomes a way for this artist to add himself to the chorus of voices saying, “No.” The difficulty of the desert is a way of evading the possibility of truth in art.

There were works that had language-like scribbles across them and those scribbles were physically running down the surface; the mysterious sentences were destroyed. In context these became an additional comment: P.S. language can’t cope with the desert either. In conversation he compared them to the white clouds in the works that included images of the sky. The sagging white vases made from coiled glue, standing on pictures of the same sky, were cloudlike in three dimensions. There were glue vases in Are We There yet? too, and now they had a different implication. They had changed. So the artist’s techniques: solvent, meltingness, glue, mutated across contexts.

In Flower + Line + Cloud, a display of technical skill has been devoted to the idea that skill is not enough. The skill creates the dissolves, the ruin, the rampant flowers; it asserts itself to describe its own opposition as it feels for the outlines of impossibility. How hard can it be, describing a landscape? He makes rows of coloured dots lurk behind a white or black scrim, constantly laying something beneath, under, over, away from us. The scratches he includes in some of the works (as if a hair has appeared in front of a lens) hint at something unruly outside, something trying to creep in and take charge, something that must be important to him because he allows it to show itself to us, to be obvious. The images themselves are deserts, planes affected by indecipherable marks and hints of things.

At the start of his Instagram comment he mentions that he grew up in a hotel on the Strip. “Growing up in a hotel on the strip had an impact on me that I feel like I’m only in the past several years fully understanding.” Thinking of that, I want to connect the eternity of the desert to the eternity of hotel corridors with their endless similar beds behind every door, a hint that this is Las Vegas’ true style: steadiness, eternity. But the next line in his caption contradicts me - “Las Vegas is a city that is constantly changing” – which reminds me that when he spoke about his work he began to open up a world of intentions that were not the ones I had imagined.

Erik Beehn, from Flower + Line + Cloud. Image courtesy the artist.

Erik Beehn, Flower + Line + Cloud
Savidan Gallery, 1310 S. 3rd Street #200, Las Vegas, NV 89104
March 21th - July 23, 2022

Published by Wendy Kveck. June 28, 2022