'Surface/Memory' RICHARD BATEMAN and YVES BEAUMONT

About

'SURFACE/MEMORY' is an exhibition exploring two contemporary artists' responses to the interior and exterior world with specific reference to the Dutch/Flemish Interior and Landscape traditions. The show brings together two young painters who, though they work in very different ways with differing concerns, share a strong geographical relationship with the 'Low Countries'. Familiar with the region's great history of painting and its two seemingly opposed strands of exterior and interior scenes both of them live, or have lived, amongst that environment, and their work gives us here an opportunity to re-assess this tradition, and present it in contemporary terms. Bateman's very gestural art functions by reduction - information is blotted from the painting by rough blocks of colour, the image resolutely reduced to the point where the paint surface can stand in for the space depicted itself. His interiors have the heavy atmosphere of enclosure and intimacy, offset by the actual source of these paintings - the interiors of animal houses at the zoo. In Beaumont's work the obliteration and layering works in a different way. Living in Oostende, he has a very particular interest in the region's light. The features of the landscape dissolve in paint, as, half-remembered, they flicker in and out of view. Yves Beaumont will be presenting works made especially for this show, in which his lyrical abstractions impose delicate structures upon what might at first seem a featureless horizon. We aim to allow a re-evaluation of this important area of the world within art and history, updating people's expectations of a 'Landscape' and 'Interiors' show. For Yves Beaumont in particular, since we gave him his first show here in the UK in 2006, there has been a growing interest in his work, bringing as it does a uniquely Flemish perspective to an often insular London art world. Although of course Luc Tuymans is well-known here it has been a pleasant surprise to see our UK audience's growing appreciation of what could be called the broader Flemish aesthetic, and we hope in re-presenting Yves in this context we are continuing to refine those perceptions.