Beaux Mendes

Critical text

Beaux Mendes’ (b. 1987, New York) practice often involves rituals of passage and pilgrimage as a tactic to disrupt and transform the experience of place, inviting altered states of experience resulting from estrangement and even imposture. In their recent work, this desire to traverse boundaries has led them through the male-coded historical conventions and sites of the Euro-American landscape and en plein air traditions, as though in drag. The image is a kind of transference that is the crux of Mendes’ poetics: its nature is never wholly perceptible, let alone conceivable¾apprehension is a balancing act on changing, uncertain ground. While Mendes investigates the spaces where paintings are displayed and received, ultimately, their thesis is something more easily felt than intellectualized, perhaps most clearly in abstract or mostly abstract works.

Text by Saim Demircan, Maurin Dietrich