Press Release

Tony Beauvy is a Los Angeles-based painter who received his M.F.A. from UCLA. The exhibition brings together a series of abstract paintings that Beauvy achieves by working out of the unconscious. His improvisational practice is as much about breaking down the surface as it is building it up. The large scale of the paintings creates environments that echo a particular sense of glowing grittiness inspired by the artist's surroundings. Beauvy grew up in Los Angeles and like in his youth, his time is split between his home in Echo Park, an industrial studio space and surfing along the coast. The combination of his buoyant, luminous palette and roughly hewn surfaces reverberates with the layered paradoxes of the city as he experiences it.

For Beauvy, resolution is achieved in the undetermined spaces of his paintings. He engages in scraping, pouring, and sanding which move the paintings toward a balance of refinement and roughness. Fibrous drips of Iridescent paint glows through more opaque fields and offers a series of contrasts that range from weathered to refined. The sense of abandonment and dissolving within the flowing areas of paint embrace the unknowable, which is where Beauvy sees the paintings reaching their highest potential. This interceding space, where the image dematerializes, yet holds interest has the most possibility and interest for both viewers and the artist.

“My paintings are born out of process and practice, addition and subtraction,” the artist states. I want to push the painting almost to its failure point – the point at which it is exhausted is where I find the most possibility. In my paintings, a sense of place appears and disappears. A constant unearthing of surface creates a geography that is not concrete, rather flexible.”