Paige Beeber’s Dizzying, Layered Abstractions

What abstraction does best is take painting apart and then put it back together differently. Paige Beeber understands that principle better than most artists, and she puts it into practice at both material and perceptual levels, melding physicality and illusion.

My first contact with Beeber’s paintings came via the computer screen. My impression then was that the paintings would be very dimensional, like montaged reliefs, so I was surprised when I finally saw the works in person—this would have been around three years ago—and realized that their layered patchwork of colors was mostly just painted rather than assembled. But let me accentuate that word: mostly. Beeber does use collage in her painting, but it is her conceptual or perceptual cutting and pasting that predominates. The literal collaging in her work complements and sometimes contradicts her purely painterly juxtapositions. At a certain distance, or in reproduction, the effect is almost trompe l’œil, but just a slightly closer or longer look is enough to dispel the momentary illusion: This is painting that always wants to keep the materiality of painting visible.

The work I saw in a spring visit to Beeber’s studio in the Gowanus section of Brooklyn seemed to be germinating. It was fascinating to see the bins full of scraps of painted canvases that she cuts up then saves for possible use in future paintings. My guess is that she stockpiles a lot more of these than she uses, but any of them might come in handy eventually. The artist, preparing to leave town for a residency at the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation in Taos, New Mexico, explained to me that she didn’t want to finish her latest paintings—which to my eye already seemed quite developed—until her return in a few months’ time. “It’s better to keep things unfinished until I come back with a fresh eye,” she told me.

Perhaps Beeber’s abstractions evoke not only multiple spaces, but multiple temporalities. They evoke the coloristic mélange of textile designs, with sequences of more translucent marks (often spray-painted) that add sensations of variable depths, while reiterated dabs of opaque color suggest patterns of embroidery atop these murky surfaces. The complexity of the interplay among these compositional layers can be dizzying. Collocations may be discordant. The eye becomes entangled. Yet the feeling that the painting’s flickering hues and overlapping parts never quite mesh is what makes the works so exhilarating. Take, as a good example, a painting from Beeber’s most recent solo show, “Phantom Threads” at New York’s Freight+Volume last year: Trick Mirror II, 2022, is dominated by a jagged many-pointed starburst outlined in white and containing a throng of short vertical white marks, through which deeper layers remain obscurely visible. This crazy star seems to communicate with a smaller, five-pointed star to its upper right that is mainly light blue, though its loose weave of horizontal and vertical marks also contains other colors. The blue star, a separate bit of canvas collaged on, presents a paradox: although materially it sits atop the painting’s surface, its recessive hues and especially their transparency create an opening into deeper space. Meanwhile, the middle ground is occupied by a dense congeries of concise rectilinear marks that divide the plane into rough triangular zones. Everything vibrates, clear boundaries become permeable, and it all seems caught in the process of making sense of itself in collaboration with the eye—not quite formed, but rather piecing a form together, or perhaps undoing a form so it can be formed differently later.