reviews > Detroit, MI

Emilie Beadle
Emilie Beadle

If Pissarro and Hans Hofmann got together and had a child in the age of pixels and global shipping, and that child grew up to make paintings, they might look something like the canvases of Emilie Beadle. Beadle uses a palette knife to apply thick squares of colorful oil in imperfect grids to form scenes that disappear into single point perspectives and sometimes feature elegant birch trees. Her paintings glitter and move, like bustling city streets and countrysides with weather. Their surfaces bear close looking, each individual square a unique space of layered, blended color, each tree branch a study in how the curve of paint application can equal an optical curve. The correspondences Beadle conjures through her unique style—pixels, cargo containers, mosaics, color swatches—are potent enough to take her paintings far beyond that one path and its attendant forest.

—Lori Waxman 11/29/15 12:31 PM