Noah Beyene
B. 1993, Stockholm.
Noah’s work engages with the human form, psychological states, and how we confront our surroundings, often attempting to bridge a gap between what can be seen and what is felt. There is a care and intimacy in the work as the artist prefers to work from personal experience, and carefully orchestrates his compositions using friends, lovers, and family members who reveal something profound about how we co-exist, co-habit, love and feel disappointment towards one another in close quarters. Noah’s works are a constant reminder that our lives are not banal, but that our understanding of our lives is always at risk of becoming banal. The task of painting is to counteract this tendency. Noah’s searingly honest portraits of domestic life in a Stockholm apartment does not ask you to see his life with your eyes; rather to see your life with his eyes, and with an inscrutable demand to see how much is going on even on days when so little seems to happen. An internationally renowned lighting director in the field of photography as well as a painter, Noah is consciously in dialogue with the history of image making and painting. For Noah, painterly mark-making grants the ability to be any and every type of image, whether wholly abstract or rendered with photorealist fidelity to the subject. However, it is in the gaps in between these two positions that the artist finds his language be it through the use of bold colour or a simple line, or a strenuously painted chair, or the feeling of soft light in a dull room that allows something to recede and almost disappear out of sight unless you squint. There is a desire to understand how to manipulate the eye and exploit the evolution of sight. This approach leads to work that keeps you engaged. Just as you thought you knew the work a new piece reveals itself as a multifaceted painting language paired with an extraordinary gift to tell a story.