Julie Beugin

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Julie Beugin, “Disguise,” 2019

acrylic and collage on paper, 31.5” x 29.5” (photo by Hans-Georg Gaul)

Julie Beugin is a Calgary-born artist who has lived in Berlin for the last decade. Using her own photographs of Berlin’s urban spaces, she draws, paints and collages intimately lyrical abstract ensembles on canvas. The works in Soft Obstacles, on view at VivianeArt in Calgary until May 18, evoke structure yet reveal nothing about their original sources.

On first glance, her work feels like it has erupted from a different era. But it is also fresh and completely of the moment. Beugin has spoken about focusing her camera on parts of Berlin built in the ’60s and ’70s, places with both muted and vivid colours inspired by nature: avocado, citron, burnt orange, horizon blue, groovy gold and hot pink.

Set against the white of the canvas, her retro colour scheme is enlivened with large translucent strokes of acrylic paint, as well as penciled lines and collaged elements plucked from earlier paintings. Each work is a play or composition based on active themes like collision, suspension, descension and flexion.

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Julie Beugin, “Soft Obstacles, 2018

acrylic and pencil on canvas, 55” x 53” (photo by Hans-Georg Gaul)

All but two paintings in the show use collage. This is not easily discernible when standing at a distance. But those without collage elements are less compelling. The others provoke reflection on the legacy of Agnes Martin – the firm yet quiet contemplation as well as the use of sensual washes and calculated pencil lines. While the two artists are vastly different on many levels, their intrinsic poetics are analogous. Both request close inspection, meditative inquiry and openness to meticulous processes.

Meticulous is not synonymous with labour intensive. By definition, it means showing great attention to detail or being very careful and precise. Beugin’s work is lyrical, quickly executed and not geometric. But it is precise.

As Martin once said: “There is so much written about art that it is mistaken for an intellectual pursuit.” Neither Beugin nor Martin seems to aspire to intellectual pursuit. They are more interested in tackling boundless form through the limits of the body.

The ambiguity of Beugin’s paintings builds on a subtle abandonment of composition and conventional abstraction, in the North American sense. More precisely, it declares painting a cartographic tool for expression. Her paintings are subtle maps that beguile viewers, inviting them to trace her creative process. As meditations on the ethereal concept of mapping an internal impulse they present a puzzle of sorts.

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Julie Beugin, “Ghostwriter,” 2018

acrylic, collage and pencil on canvas, 47” x 39.5” (photo by Hans-Georg Gaul)

Beugin’s process is intuitive, narrative and, in her own words, an “open-ended complexity of space where structures of … painting hover on different planes … and surface and depth fluctuate.” Her work reminds me of spaces we normally can’t see yet still inhabit.

An initial reading might render her works as thin paint brushed onto canvas. However, time yields a more nuanced analysis. What Beugin has referred to as a “washy under-painting” is an immediate and unpretentious approach to the sensual.

All the works contain under-drawings in pencil, traced out in undulating lines that meander across the canvas. Sometimes they disappear behind a piece of collaged canvas or are veiled by a translucent brushstroke. While they may have been intended as a map, other elements, which clearly deviate from mapping, evoke obstacles in life that move us onto different paths in unexpected ways. ■

Soft Obstacles is on view at VivianeArt in Calgary from April 12 to May 18, 2019.