For this exhibit, Beaux Mendes, descended from a long line of rabbis and Holocaust survivors, returned to his ancestral country of Germany to reflect on his inherited legacy. The Los Angeles-based artist painted in the Black Forest, where Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger kept his hut, as well as in the Elbe Valley, which inspired Caspar David Friedrich, among other German Romantics. In an accompanying exhibition text, Mendes writes: “I return to Frankfurt to paint [my grandmother’s] house and I think I can paint myself too.
Although this exhibition does not feature any self-portraits in the conventional sense, Mendes’ small paintings, executed on non-traditional surfaces like wood panels and muslin, instead do something odd in the Heideggerian sense, merging metaphysical exploration with the excavation of the landscape. This does not mean that the human body is totally absent; its form might be, but its absent presence figures in these rigorous, often dark pastel examinations of the place. Omma, 2022 – titled after the affectionate term for grandma in German – features a welcoming cabin in the forest, the sloping terrain in front of it enlivened with a mush of yellowish-white. Here, as elsewhere, the thin washes of paint evoke a dreamy, watery sense of wonder.
In another untitled painting from 2023, is it a close-up of twisted tree trunks, or is it the buttocks of a naked body mounting another from behind? These haunting landscapes are encrypted in a fog of secrecy, and it is this mystery that sustains them, allowing them to linger on the walls of our minds. Maybe you can go home.
