Like Anything
Riley Beaumont
09.02.24 - 11.02.24
Blunt yet mischievous, energetic yet considered Riley Beaumont and his art are one in the same. Predominantly working across the discipline of painting, Beaumont’s practice is a foray into abstraction and inquiry of painting in the expanded field. Self-aware, Beaumont’s paintings confront their corporeality, pairing back the pictorial field to tessellated squares of colour and form and leaving only the questions of what is painting and why do we paint on the table. A canvas spliced into quarters, a rhomboid running from itself, a diamond rounding out with inhalation. The paintings in ‘Like Anything’ carry the feral vigour of an artist struck by creative lightning. At first glance these graphic and bright paintings seem flat evoking the crisp purity of colour integral to John Nixon’s EPW (2004) paintings. As you move closer however both the tonal and textural complexity of Beaumont’s practice rises to the surface. Layered with a sense of gestural clarity Beaumont operates in a state of play and exploration with the paint, fine strokes layered upon large, considered marks upon haphazard. The notion of artistic excellence as a “flash of brilliance” is a fallacy that the boys club of 20th century abstract expressionists sold us. There is no brilliance without learning, no originality without reference; everything is self-reflexive. To be deeply intertwined with your practice is to be brilliant. Beaumont breathes the same air as his art, his essence is palpable.
Words Lily Beamish, At The Above
Born 1992 in Coolum/Gubbi Gubbi, QLD, Riley Beaumont received his Honours in Painting from the ANU School of Art in 2016. Recent solo exhibitions include New Paintings, Gallery9, Sydney/Gadigal Country, 2022; AIR, At The Above, Melbourne/Naarm, 2022; If I Were Racehorse They’d Have Shot Me By Now, TWFINEART, Brisbane/Meanjin, 2020; Quixotic Indifference, ANCA, Canberra/Ngambri and Ngunnawal Country, 2019; Inconsistent harmonies contradicted by a temporal existence, CCAS, Canberra/Ngambri and Ngunnawal Country, 2015.
Beaumont was recently a finalist in the Waverley Art Prize 2022, Bayside Acquisitive Art Prize 2023, and a 2024 Bundanon Residency recipient.
Photography courtesy of Mark Owen.
Opening event sponsored by The Evelyn.
Opening event photography courtesy of Stingray.