JULIE BEAUFILS Diegesis

When I visit her light filled studio in Paris this winter, French painter Julie Beaufils (b. 1987) tells me: “Painting is a place where we can travel to a kind of quiet place, where the immensity is present, but there’s some kind of human reference for the eye, something you can hold onto, to cope with it all.” She chooses the word “diegesis,” ancient Greek, to title to this, her first exhibition at the gallery. French film theorists first revived the term in the 1950s, and art critic Craig Owens adopted it in his writings on poetics and metaphor. “It means a particular space and time from a fiction,” Beaufils explains. “Which totally makes sense for painting. Because one painting is one fiction. Each one gives a different kind of feeling.”

Beaufils is a traveler, drawn to desert landscapes, which she considers analogous to mental clarity. She’s developed a rigorous and introspective aesthetic, adopting a perfectly “neutral” square to contain the expansiveness of her abstract landscapes. As if appearing in mirage, individual elements in Beaufils’s oil paintings hover on the surface of her canvases in radiant vibrations of color and line. “Each element in these paintings is like a thought,” she says. Unique and electric, then, if we allow ourselves to plunge into the vast complexities of the human brain.

For the first time here, Beaufils exhibits her drawings as finished works, giving us a glimpse at her process. She consistently starts her work on canvas with a selection of her favorite drawings, which she refers to as a “mother structure” or “dictionary of shapes.” As if reading from a map, Beaufils consults these drawings to determine where her paintings might go. Here, we can see the wind filled element in her drawing Giant (all works 2022) unfurl and expand in her large-scale painting Canopy. Like Pool, that glows with a shimmering vision of water and deep space, this work is rendered on a brilliant stretch of textured cotton. All other canvases here are stretched linen, whose darker tone shifts towards shadow and fine weave allows Beaufils’s enigmatic compositions an even sharper silhouette. In Judgement (clarity) a nearly anthropomorphic figure rises jubilant; on wood, Beaufils’s tightly balanced construction truly sparkles.

Mixing her own paints with natural pigments, Venetian red, red iron oxide, burnt umber, Green earth, and yellow ochres, Beaufils’s palette begins, for the most part here, with cool blues and purples, colors of dusk and shadow from an in between time and place. “I start each painting with a first color that will decide of the rest of the painting. One tone calls for another and another and another. It’s like a chain reaction.” Energetic and alive.

Titles come last, “like a key, to lead people to a certain vibe where they can finish the story.” Her canvas Boomerang, for example, pictures two forms that hint at the ancient tool, one ascending left, the other fluttering right. For Beaufils, this work imagines a model of Karma. “Whatever you put out in the world, it’s going to come back to you in some way.” Reminding us of our place in space and time, Beaufils’s work quietly requests engagement. What if we might follow her on this path towards lucidity, that flickering possibility of peace, even if it is only a fiction?

Text By Lillian Davies. All quotes: Artist’s conversation with the writer, Paris, December 14, 2022