Many artists in the Western canon have developed skills in several different media, combining draughtsmanship and painting, drawing and furniture making, and so on. Dominic Beattie is an artist who is known and admired equally for his ornate vibrant coloured pictorial and spatial representations.
Exploring Beattie’s opus, we soon realise the richness of his visual language. His latest series, Ersatz Ceramics, 2020, comprises vibrant and deceptive objects which seem at first glance to be contemporary jugs, bowls, plates and containers. At closer scrutiny we notice that these entities are completely solid unable to neither contain liquid nor anything else. Beattie’s new sculptural pieces substitute the vessel - ‘Ersatz’ - the German term for replacement’, an appropriate appellation.
Beattie’s continuously challenges his practice in the attempt to re-invent his vernacular. He fabricates his assemblages using repetitive processes and embraces whatever materials he has at hand. His methods are disciplined and monotonous – continuously observing, selecting, creating and connecting – in an effort to reveal different associations.
Patterns and pigments have been in use since prehistory. When I worked at the British Museum as a curator, I had the opportunity to examine bell-shaped beakers from the Beaker culture, (2800–1800 BC), admiring their complicated comb-impressed decorations. Undeniably, ornamentations mirror the time we live in as we can observe in Beattie’s oil pastel drawings. They are bestowed with repeated rhombus-shaped and other geometrical tessellations, conveying an intense playfulness, perhaps signifying secret tribal codes. Patterns once deemed redundant by the modernists, to him they are the lifeline of his painterly abstractions, giving us an insight into the passion he feels for their relevance. His creative yield resonates with different practices, ranging from tribalism, cubism to op, pop and aborigine art.
Beattie’s paintings create illusions of movement and engage the viewer’s perception with simultaneously shifting patterns of forms and changing, optical mixtures of colours. These constructs are about the dynamism of visual forces, articulating the environments they occupy.
The ‘Studio Chair’, which he developed with the architect Lucia Buceta, in 2015, is authentic and unconstrained. During the development stages of the chair Beattie discovered that he cherished design equal to art and expanded the chair concept into a diverse bold furniture collection. Beattie’s aesthetic is up-lifting, evoking cool vibes, enhancing the relationship between an artwork and human beings and the emotional response to such an object.
Dominic Beattie has exhibited widely in the UK and internationally. Recently his work was shown at the Saatchi Gallery, the Royal Academy, JGM Gallery. In 2018, he curated the exhibition ‘Harder Edge’, A Multigenerational Survey of Recent Abstraction, featuring seventeen artists. The exhibition opened at the H Club, Covent Garden, and later toured to the Saatchi Gallery. In 2015, he won the 'UK/Raine Prize’ for painting.
Newsletter:
Courtesy and ©Dominic Beattie and Renée Pfister (text), 2020.
Video:
Courtesy and ©Dominic Beattie, Ben Sound (music)
https://www.bensound.com/royalty-free-music/track/moose
and Renée Pfister (text), with the assistance of Galina Matveeva, 2020. All rights reserved.
Dominic Beattie, 'Ersatz Ceramic # 1', from the Ersatz Ceramic series, 2020, ink, spray paint, cardboard, wood, dimensions variable.