Riley Beaumont: If I Were A Racehorse They’d Have Shot Me By Now

A current ANCA studio resident, ‘If I Were A Racehorse, They’d Have Shot Me By Now’ is Riley’s debut solo exhibition at TWFINEART.

‘Contradiction is the driving force behind this series of paintings, so this self-deprecating title seemed fitting for my first solo exhibition at TWFINEART.’ Riley Beaumont

The body of work consists of three large-scale paintings and five smaller monochromatic paintings.  This venture back into a reductive chromatic formalism is Riley’s nod to the heavyweights of American abstract painting (Albers, Hofmann, Newman, Reinhardt, Rothko, Ryman, Stella etc.). However, the limited palette isn’t executed in a consistent fashion, instead, excessive materiality deconstructs formal elements of the composition. These monochrome works can operate as a ‘user manual,’ of sorts, for the viewer to read the larger paintings that purposefully overwhelm with their material dissent and baroque use of colour and scale.

The larger paintings epitomise Riley’s aesthetic sensibility; fragmented and abrasive, rather than perfectly pitched ratios of colour, they elaborate on the visual language established in the monochromatic works, attempting to do away with any predetermined aesthetic niceties and instead indulge in dereliction and delinquency.

The work is fresh and rooted in the present while carrying on the modernist tradition of Abstract Expressionism and the artistic heritage of civilisations long gone.