Office Space

Edie’s Enjambment

June 1, 2021 - July 31, 2021

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Office Space is proud to announce the debut virtual solo show of Los Angeles-based painter Edie Beaucage with her latest series of seven paintings on paper and an innovative non-fungible (NFT) token on the Rarible platform which is based on a lost painting, possibly destroyed deliberately or overwritten. With this overture, this particular exhibitions serves as the first of a three part epic opera (similar to Berlioz) about the poetics of the body in space, the sociology of observed French Canadian and Los Angeles flâneur subcultures, and the exploration of NFT’s in conjunction with traditional painting practices as a methodology for resurrecting lost or stolen artworks or excavating visual orphans into new meanings.

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Beaucage’s varied complex series of works on paper explore an endless combination of sensual brushstrokes in offbeat colors that veer between the purely abstract and the casual figurative. Forms remain ambiguous such as the double entendre between cigarette smoke and waves of distorted speech from the lips of the character in Bearded Whistler or the flowing and matching streaks between the hair and the garments of the lone figure in Akio. Even humans and objects are obfuscated in a haze within the viewer’s eyes where an implicit cigar box with a face inscribed on its lid could be misread as sallow patient recovering underneath the covers of a bed within Ne Me Quitte Pas. In poetic terms, an enjambment serves as the continuous flow of thought between the formal break of two poetic lines; here the artist’s works serve as a free flow amongst multiple imaginative forms in a broken harmony that exists despite the actual boundaries or shapes formally cut from each other upon a superficial glance of these works.

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The poetic enjambment also ties into the often interrupted yet continual wanderings of the flâneur within an urban or even natural environment as inspired by the final work of Walter Benjamin within his unfinished The Arcades Project. Within Convulate M entitled “The Flâneur,” Benjamin describes “A word dropped by chance will reveal to him one of those character traits that cannot be invented and that must be drawn directly from life; those physiognomies so naively attentive will furnish the painter with the expression he was dreaming of; a noise, insignificant to every other ear, will strike that of the musician and give him the cue for a harmonic combination; even for the thinker, the philosopher lost in his reverie, this external agitation is profitable: it stirs up his ideas as the storm stirs the waves of the sea. . . .” (453) Here Beaucage develops her private system of character traits as an amalgam between gestural brushstrokes sprouting from the shared dreams between artist and observer while demonstrating a close eye for those qualities that are ignored often by the general populace rapidly in the bustle of our fast paced lives, even by the subject(s) within the paintings themselves. The sharp delineation of human nuances behave as the reversal of an ekphrasis where her visual poems form the nexus for implicit literary texts; every brushstroke as poetic line becomes the lineage for a fulfilled life to be lived and experienced.

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Beaucage’s miniature exploration of fashionable shoes and café food as in the work Crumpets becomes a cultural encyclopedia for the flâneur’s daily accessories. Nodding towards the early illustrations of Warhol, these tools for feet act as characters of their own. Perhaps there is a certain act of defiance like in the Nancy Sinatra’s anthem “These Boots Were Made for Walkin’.” The intellectual life captured in the streets and sidewalks of Los Angeles as a displaced form of 19th century Paris are embedded within the visual riddles of the artist’s private lexicon of these everyday accessories imbued with quiet significance for a subculture combining panache and profundity in the poetic routines of urban living.

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The artist’s illustrative possibility of the forlorn or socializing wanderer concludes with a provocative conjunction amongst art history, new technologies, and traditional figurative painting. Sasha which exists only online on the Rarible platform as a NFT becomes a digital reconstruction of what is lost in the physical human world, whether intended or accidental. As a character study embellished with the sly reference to the gold within Gustav Klimt’s luxurious phase, this edition reflects the NFT’s embedded structure in the illusory capital of cryptocurrency while acknowledging the necessity of art practice being tied to a practice everyday humanity within a post-human world drawn into smartphone screens and genetic modified foods, all technological constructs fixating us away from our collective hearts. Beaucage’s NFT demonstrates the inherent contradiction between our primal need to communicate through more immediate media such as text messaging and social media while mirroring our desire to collect art objects tied to the physical sensuality of the world around us.

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May Sasha find her own happiness within our fifth dimension someday.

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Bientôt nous plongerons dans les froides ténèbres;
Adieu, vive clarté de nos étés trop courts!
J'entends déjà tomber avec des chocs funèbres
Le bois retentissant sur le pavé des cours.

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Edie Beaucage, American, (b. Quebec, Canada), lives and works in Los Angeles. She received her MFA from Otis College of Art and Design in 2010. Edie has presented solo exhibitions at VOLTA New York, Luis De Jesus Los Angeles, CB1 Gallery, Creative Artists Agency (CAA). Group exhibitions include School Of Visual Arts SVA NY and Tiger Strikes Asteroid TSA_PDF NY, Art Toronto Fair; UNTITLED Miami Beach; LAX-Los Angeles Airport; Chinese American Museum, Los Angeles. Edie is featured in The LA Times, KCRW DNA Radio, Art and Cake, Beautiful/Decay, Artillery, KCET.org, and Whitehot Magazine. Private Collections include Creative Artists Agency, CAA, Los Angeles, Flockhart-Ford Collection, Los Angeles; Preiser Collection, London and Lord-Patton Collection, Montreal. She is represented by Luis de Jesus Los Angeles and Office Space.