Noah Beyene | Headfirst, 2023

Noah Beyene

Noah Beyene Headfirst

A naked man is caught suspended, mid-dive, above a glassy, black lake. His torso and thighs are illuminated by a kind of parchment green, like an El Greco saint. A young couple, the woman visibly pregnant, lounge at the water’s edge on a checked rug; her eyes are black holes and fade off to her right, while the man stares into a night sky that is kept from our view. The first question that the composition of Noah Beyene’s Headfirst (2023) asks principally concerns narrative. Are the man and the couple related, physically, in the here and now, perhaps friends or acquaintances, or does he stand (or jump) as a metaphor for their predicament of risk and grace under pressure as young parents? We cannot help but think about cephalic birth: the way most of us enter the world, headfirst, thrown into a set of circumstances that we never chose but are now all we will ever know. The title of course refers to the technique of the diver entering the water, which is right there in front of us, but also a state or feeling of recklessness. To go on your nerve. To baulk at restraint. A transitional state and yet, here, held perfectly in place.

As in all his paintings, Beyene imbues a profound look of fidelity to our lives, not unlike a nineteenth-century realist playwright, while always representing a heightened atmosphere of feeling that cannot be directly represented but lurks, in a sideways expression or fleeting glance, somewhere in the shadows, painfully there and yet unseen. More than anything else, Beyene is willing to risk the big gesture: to take hold of the problem of figurative painting in an age of over-saturation of stylised image-making, and render the form newly exciting and daring.

We find Beyene at the start of a promising career. The present exhibition at Addis Fine Arts is the first solo gallery show of his works to date. Born in Stockholm to a Swedish mother, a teacher, and an Ethiopian father, an artist, Beyene’s works often depict those close to him, friends and family, who are reimagined as though siphoned through the pulsating lens of the cinematic auteur. Beyene’s paintings often feel like tableau vivants in oil paint: they are unflinching stories, scenes, snapshots into a life, while always oscillating between the literal and the profound. Like us, Beyene knows the most present people in our lives well: the shape of a friend’s wrist, the drop of a grandmother’s shoulder, the arc in the heel of a lover still sleeping beside us. Like us, Beyene knows how much is at stake in an attentive life, and how much meaning can be tenuously held, like an over-heating valve, in the parts that keep us connected to those we love.

Beyene’s most recent body of works, all but two produced in watercolour and oil on linen in the summer of 2023, overtly take up the subject of the nocturne as a starting point but not an end. These new works tenderly depict two sides of metropolitan activity at night.

One half is dominated by the spontaneous world of friendship and revelry, in the park or by the lake long after the sun has set, a place where wine flows and silent intimacies are formed away from the inebriated hum; and its reverse, when all has settled and interactions of any kind have melted into the black, and you find yourself totally and painfully alone.

In Dialectic (2023), Beyene manages to imbue an extraordinary religiosity into the scene, as though Fra Angelico had stumbled upon stretched-out bohemians on the shores of the Söderström. An illuminated woman on the left of the composition closes her eyes, far away in a trance, while a younger woman, turned away from us, studies her palm with the intensity of a pilgrim on discovering a requillary. A foreboding man in an opencollared white-buttoned-down, whose face remains in half in darkness, stares ferociously as the distant embers of the cityscape beyond burn like water set alight by blue halogen. All the nocturnal paintings are set in places that the artist spent time in his youth and adolescence. They sparkle with the faintest flash of nostalgia or, more accurately, should be seen as a kind of minnesbild, the Swedish concept that translates as a ‘memory-image’, or the vivid visual quality of a moment recollected long after it has passed. In this, we can all relate to Beyene’s masterful strokes: it is often the feeling elicited by our reaction to something, and not the thing itself, that we remember most powerfully. By using the minnesbild as a strategy to seek out his compositions, Beyene recovers not events in remembered places, but the atmosphere of another time – the falling light, the presence of a friend – and with it his memories of feeling.

In the second category of nocturne, Beyene turns away from the insouciant pleasures of youth and to his grandmother, his mother’s mother, who lives alone in a small house in Bromma, western Stockholm. Holding a hospital-issue crutch with one hand and clutching cushions to be kept from the rain with another, she walks away from where we are standing to her porch, which is lit by such a virulently yellow light that it resembles an inferno on the far side of a prairie. Remembering Not to Forget To (2023) is a fine example of Beyene’s new practice of risk-taking in watercolour, allowing him to create images, in his own words, ‘to be on the cusp of reality but also about to dissolve.’ Given its necessary interplay of control and constraint, the watercolour medium enables Beyene to create works that seem to emanate both life and death in the same picture. I like to think of Beyene’s handling of watercolour as analogous to the wanderer in the field, who would rather allow a butterfly to land on his fingers than catch it in his net. These are paintings that relish the opening out of forms, and celebrate contingent beauty, rather than seek to snare truths and fix them beyond the time that is allotted to them.

Several contemporary painters, such as Lynette Yiadom-Boakye and Jennifer Packer, have taken up the subject of light with the same enthusiasm as the School of Delft or the Caravaggisti. Beyene, too, should be part of this conversation: his ability to emphasise extraordinarily localised areas of light, while not compromising the shadow-play of the whole composition, is a singular gift. Night Fell, Day Broke (2023) is a sumptuous overflow of fleshy crevices and flooded pockets of colour. The male figure, a self-portrait, raises his head and is consumed by the fresh morning sunlight. Like a misshapen halo, in which a mark of some kind of revelation is told to us but in an unsuspecting place, the golden light on his face is as much a sign of happenstance as divine providence. Who among us has not awoken at an ungodly hour, wretched from a nightmare or residual anxiety, and believed the world to be different than it is? Laid between his lover’s lazy ankles and the morning light, all that is revealed is that life is just as it should be.

In the near-diptych, Humpty Dumpty and Q&A (both 2023), Beyene paints a delicate selfportrait in a cradled egg yoke, followed by a smashed eggshell under bare feet. It might be tempting to see this as a literal pairing of paintings, of simple cause and effect. (A view amplified, perhaps, by the simplicity of the former’s title, borrowed from the popular nursery rhyme). And yet, in their precarious restraint, they conclude many of the important themes of this exhibition: the realisation that we must care for our attachments in the world for want of losing them, that we must pay attention to the world even (or especially) when it appears the most banal to us, and that we can find revelatory experience even in the smallest of things: an egg, the dappled light in Bromma, the memory of a jump.

Essay by Matthew Holman

Headfirst , 202 Oil on linen

140 x 105 cm

Night fell, day broke, 2023 Oil on linen 140 x 105 cm

Dialectic , 2023

Water colour and oil on linen 110 x 90 cm

Dear, headlights , 2023

Oil on linen

100 x 78 cm.

Not To Forget To , 2023

Remembering

Water colour and oil on linen

110 x 90 cm

Comforter , 2022

Oil on canvas

29½ x 25⅝ in.

75 x 65 cm

Humpty Dumpty, 2023 Oil on linen

43¼ x 24¾ in.

110 x 63 cm

Addis Fine Art is a leading African contemporary art gallery with locations in London and Addis Ababa. The gallery was founded in 2016 by Rakeb Sile and Mesai Haileleul, with a focus on artists from Ethiopia, the Horn of Africa, and its diasporas. Since then, it has championed African artists on the international stage and established itself as a significant voice in the contemporary African art market. It has developed an international programme showcasing mid-career artists through its London gallery space, one of the city's few Black and African-owned art galleries. The gallery's Addis Ababa location has evolved into a regional incubator for undiscovered talent, exhibiting and developing the careers of emerging artists.

Addis Fine Art

21 Eastcastle Street

London W1W 8DD

© 2023 Addis Fine Art

Credits: Ikenna Malbert

Text by Matthew Holman

All images © 2023 Noah Beyene

Artwork and studio photography: Lucy Emms

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