After seeing Beshty's show at the Barbican, ‘Marginalia’ at the Thomas Dane Gallery, comes as such a surprise. The dozen or so large-scale canvases are essentially drop sheets, containing remnants from the cyanotype process used for the other works. Their final composition was (presumably) not in the artist’s control. Yet this lack of intervention has the effect of freeing the forms. With some of the melancholy geometric shapes positively jumping off the surface, the works bring to mind Lyonel Feininger’s Bauhaus woodcut ‘Cathedral’. Monochromatic but with hints of cyan, not only are these ‘paintings’ the physical base for the pieces at the Barbican, they hit deeper, too: the level of abstraction actually makes them more tactile, more effecting, less affected. And if these two shows don’t sate you, a further Thomas Dane show features a series of Beshty’s X-ray photos: small, moody and lovely.
Ananda Pellerin