BEAU GABRIEL

BLACKBERRY RONDO

OPENING THURSDAY, JUNE 12, 6—8

ON VIEW JUNE 13 — JULY 26, 2025

The proliferation of experiences and emotions that comprise each individual’s personal history might be remembered by a few stories, all the more vivid in their retelling, and a handful of intense images. By virtue of it being selective, and beholden to the conventions of narrative, memory is creative. Not only that, but memories pass from one generation to another, acquiring new meanings and echoes. If memory is an art, how might an artist reflect the richness of its styles and mechanisms in their own practice? Robert Lowell, in his poem ‘Epilogue’, proposes ‘plot and rhyme’ as ways to order and digest the past. Beau Gabriel’s new cycle of paintings offer alternative formal solutions for transforming memory into a work of art: echoes, allusions and borrowings that all fall under the umbrella of intertextuality.  These paintings offer episodes from Gabriel’s family history in Marin County in Northern California, but consistently and inventively channel these private myths through imagery drawn from Italian Renaissance art. Chains of associations wind around well-known scenes and stories in mutually transformative relationships. The paintings accommodate a loose narrative of becoming — a young woman’s bildung in charged, pastel marshlands and pastures — but don’t insist upon being read sequentially.

Marin opens the cycle on a protagonist akin to the allegorically rich prologue character in early modern opera. Sat on a scrap heap with a carpenter’s pencil and a colander, she announces key associations between creativity — making in its most expansive sense — the land and femininity. Formidable in her bearing, granted an air of omniscience, she represents a citation and subversion of the idealised, timeless beauty of the Renaissance female portrait. 

Ring Mountain comes next, a reimagining of Jupiter’s seduction of Io in the form of a dark cloud, a story originally found in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and famously envisioned by Antonio da Correggio in his 1530 painting. Correggio draws out the story’s intertwining of terror and eroticism, furnishing Jupiter’s disguise with unsettling anthropomorphic details. Gabriel alludes to both the traditional cloud of myth, and its atmospheric sibling, fog, a common feature of the Northern Californian coastline. His rendering sees the female figure sat upright, feeling the fog run through her hands rather than succumbing to its obliterating force: it is an image of active sensuality — a corrective Correggio — rather than of violent surrender.

Another answer to tradition, August takes a pose synonymous with the history of the nude, the orientation of her body recalling that of Ingres’ Grande Odalisque (1814), and reimagines it in a real context of women’s leisure and pleasure. This painting shares its mood and central symbol — the blackberry — with Richard Wilbur’s poem Blackberries for Amelia. Gabriel and Wilbur each reflect on how to live with and through nature rather than seeking to subjugate it, how to know its rhythms and build a life around reaping its fruits in the broadest sense. Pastureland extends the themes of August, using a childhood photograph of Gabriel and his grandfather to suggest how the land might model forms of nurturance and growth, as well as stage or even archive intergenerational family relations.

Suddenly, the mood begins to turn. Anticipatory tension haunts The Coming Storm. A trio of women arranged in conversation resemble the men in the foreground of Piero della Francesca’s The Flagellation of Christ (1459). In della Francscesca’s highly unusual composition, the titular event of the painting is pushed into the background, prioritising the life that continues unabated around it. Gabriel references this to suggest the coterminous relation between the momentous and the mundane. As a narrative technique, it pushes us on to the climactic moment within the cycle, The Flood. Here the flood as told in Genesis is overlaid by several important Italian retellings of the story — most vividly by Paolo Uccello  — as well as Gabriel’s mother’s memories of Marin County, which has atmospheric and topographical conditions that make it particularly vulnerable to flooding. In Uccello’s as much as in Gabriel’s vision, water envelops, rearranges, transforms, scrambles, upends the usual order of things and produces a dreamlike landscape. Gabriel’s flooded field uses tonal juxtaposition and surreal imagery to evoke how disaster elicits as much humour, tenderness and unexpected togetherness amongst its victims as it does peril. Birds, animals and frogs are benevolent presences: a bird perches conversationally on a galvanized tub in which a figure floats; a cow gazes out placidly towards the water; a raven and a frog elect themselves as companions to the presiding women. Allusions — sometimes just half-rhymes rather than full blown quotations — abound. Michelangelo’s Doni Madonna (1507) is conjured in the pose and palette of the central female figure, who twists not towards her husband, but towards another woman. Through this simple substitution, The Holy Family motif is revisited as a vehicle for exploring intimacy between women. The drapery of Renaissance costuming is playfully referenced in the women’s modern dress, baggy sweatshirts and open shirts, skirts hitched up to reveal boots and bare legs. Uccello’s fresco, Scenes from the Life of Noah (1447) shows the devastation of the flood alongside the water receding — with little formal indication that these are two separate episodes —  meaning a huge span of time and action is distilled into the parameters of a single image. The Flood operates through a similarly asynchronous sense of time. Do these figures all coexist, or do they represent the same figure moving steadily through different stages of preparedness, shock, recovery and resolution? 

Destruction spares the fortunate few and eventually opens out into a different, better world. A version of this plays out in Willows, the next scene of the cycle in which women congregate to replant willows felled by the flood. There is a sense of aliveness and expansive possibility in the effortless choreography of their gestures and glances. They are a frieze of Botticelli nymphs, radiant, a dancerly quality to their steps, and they are practical modern women in sensible shoes, their hair scraped back in anticipation of the work ahead.  In his studio, Gabriel tells me that a willow can be grown from snapping a twig from the tree and planting it straight into the ground. This fact has an allegorical feel that characterises the mood of Willows. Rebirth and regeneration are ready at hand, the means clear and accessible, energised by a harmoniousness and rightness that gives these processes an almost mystical quality.

We close, appropriately, on The Night. A woman sits before a trestle timber structure, the kind once used to support railway tracks, and often now in states of disrepair and disuse. Part crucifix — perhaps the most unavoidable wooden object in the history of Western European art — part shed for the sheltering Mary and Joseph, this structure crystallises the fertile points of contact at the centre of the cycle. This is where religion, folklore, history and lived experience meet, where the written, visual and the aural embellish and reinterpret each other, where Italy of the fourteenth century collides with twentieth century California.

Beau Gabriel (b. 1992, New York City) graduated from Yale University with a degree in Russian literature. He left for France upon graduating, working in a law office and studying baroque oboe before turning to painting. He then moved to London in 2017 and obtained an MA from the Royal College of Art. Beau uses traditional approaches to formalism and materiality to explore his American upbringing, relationship to history, and authorial role as a painter. His technique and style are the result of his deep engagement with early Italian painting. By placing personal narratives at the centre of historical modes of art-making, Beau explores ideas of place and memory in our current moment. Gabriel’s solo exhibitions include Blackberry Rondo, CARVALHO, New York (2025), Salt Marsh Hay, London (2025) and Roadside Thistles, Siena (2024), with C.G. Williams. Gabriel has participated in group exhibitions in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, France, and China.

CARVALHO (est. 2019) A synthesis of the Director’s background in performing and visual arts informs a distinct point-of-view that shapes the gallery’s cross-disciplinary program, privileging the sensorial experience of the art object and space. CARVALHO features international emerging and mid-career artists whose practices reconsider distinctions of increasingly fluid categorization – of the visual art, performing art, and craft realms – through dedicated inquiry and meticulous approaches to material and process. Exhibitions work to activate the viewer’s environment, expanding space for engagement and discourse between disciplines. At the close of 2023, on the cusp of its five-year anniversary, CARVALHO expanded its galleries into the adjacent building, doubling its exhibition space and program. The second gallery focuses on installation and performance, echoing the Director’s foundations, and allowing artists to realize more ambitious collaborations and projects.