Beth Letain at L21 Gallery

Artist: Beth Letain

Exhibition title: Mountain Climbers

Venue: L21 Gallery, Mallorca, Spain

Date: September 10 – November 3, 2021

Photography: Lúa Oliver / all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and L21 Gallery, Mallorca

Art is the concrete representation of our most subtle feelings.

—Agnes Martin

It seems adequate to introduce this textual accompaniment to Beth Letain’s exhibition at L21 entitled Mountain Climbers, with a quote by American painter Agnes Martin (1912-2004). Not only because Martin is amongst Letain’s recognised references, but also considering that there are substantial similarities in their ‘savoir faire’: a gestural expression on flawless surfaces; a direct and confident brushwork; and a seamless simplicity which conceals an inner intuitive compositional logic. As Letain said, ‘for me, if there are two rectangles coming together then they have to be orange’¹ .

This sentence could be a poem – reduced, concise and vibrant like the gestures in Letain’s canvases. Their titles could be as well:

Dialtone
Anemone
Cicada
Cavewoman
Threat Bucket

It is when the body is keyed to its highest potential and controlled to a profound harmony deepening into something that resembles a trance, that I discover most nearly what it is to be. I have walked out of the body and into the mountain.

—Nan Shepherd, ‘The Living Mountain’

The works’ titles in the exhibition might give us a hint on the core of their meaning, but the answer is a moulding, negative or packaging of it. In Letain’s practice, form and colour occur at the same time, elements that are derived from her drawing practice. Phone-sized drawings with gouache and watercolour are the basis for the painting. I imagine hundreds of them being made, until a few asks to be trasposed into a bigger size.

A few passages of Nan Shepherd’s ‘The Living Mountain’ come to mind while thinking through Letain’s paintings. Surely the exhibition title unknots a certain narrative – paintings like rocks, vibrant matter that has its own life, and therefore producing an affect. An attempt at communication.

Beth Letain’s canvases – as much as Shepherd’s tale is ‘timeless’. Not because it delivers some ‘universal’ truth, but rather because it provides a type of knowledge and a perception of this knowledge that is intimate. It has both an affective and an intellectual dimension and therefore it transcends the traditional divide of experience into the two categories – a subjective and personal versus an objective and public one – that modern Western philosophies have generally privileged.

Mountain Climbers are contemplative. Inviting the audience to pause and join in their inner action.

Flying Colors: Beth Letain on Her Electrifying, ‘Slightly Perverse’ Painting Practice, Ana Finel Honigman, ARTnews, 2019.
Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain. Canongate Books Ltd, Edimburgh, 2008.

-Cristina Ramos