Basil Beattie
The Janus Series

Beattie’s exhibition at Two Rooms is the first showing from a major new body of paintings: The Janus Series.

Epic in scale and uncompromising in their use of simple pictorial devices and subtly restrained colour, these complex and resonant works show new developments in his work. Poised in their potential readings between landscape vistas of horizon lines, train tracks or ploughed scrub fields and formal plays of line, space and recesses within the pictures’ surfaces; the meanings of these paintings reside ultimately in the physical reality of paint. Paint, in gobbets and drips that fall over the surface of the canvases, paint as articulate, eloquent graphic line, paint as mass and as absence. As their generic title suggests these works look forwards and back and are amongst the strongest and most resolute of Beattie’s career.