"As Markus Verhagen points out in Modern Painters in 2005: The works are thus animated by an inherent contradiction and discreetly play with a conceptual flaw authorizing the artist to confer on them the serious status of work of art while the irony of his gesture refers at the same time to the fallibility of this very status.
John Beech, originally from England, pursued his studies and his entire artistic development in the United States and was undoubtedly impregnated with pop and minimal culture from the 1970s on. However, this artist has not forgotten his origins and his relationship to pictorial culture has been nourished as much by European movements as by American postures. In fact, in a singular way and contrary to most contemporary artists, he does not ignore his sources; on the contrary, he invites them into his practice, rubbing them together, using them in a contradictory way, turning their founding concepts upside down.
John Beech has a predilection for industrial materials that he uses for their intrinsic properties. There is a kind of initial antagonism that participates in the artistic experimentation and the birth of the form, between the rusticity or even the brutality of the material and its vocabulary inspired by a minimalist tendency. In the same way, John Beech applies on monumental photographs of containers or skips zones of monochrome colors or streaks the surface with large colored bands that restructure the image. In his coatted drawings, he succeeds spectacularly in bringing out the abstraction of a photographic image anchored in the most raw reality. In the same gesture, he confers a minimal plasticity to these large flat tints affixed to geometrically shaped volumes while displacing the very space of abstraction. The color is the principle which governs the vision, it invades the real as the plastic language. A kind of plastic counterptery that twists the meaning of the image or the material by the perfectionism of a radical reading. However any triviality is removed from these assemblages because the formal rendering that the artist gives to see through his objects, sculptures, paintings, photographs or serigraphs is finally very far from their origin.
The formal terminology in use here becomes instantly obsolete because the sculptural surfaces demonstrate a belonging to painting, while painting interferes in the volume, that the "drawings" have as much to do with painting by their surface as with collage by the addition of colored bands, and, finally, with photography by the background.
The space is constantly destabilized by the forms thus identified in the images or fabricated in the painting-objects and by the volumes with double sculptural and pictorial obedience that the artist places in balance in the exhibition space.
Everywhere it is a question of function and disjunction, John Beech eliminates the first use of materials or industrial forms to give them a plastic determinism and to confer them a fictitious notion of use reversing here the duchampian detour. His sets of sculptures or rather painted objects, the rotating paintings are a good example, surfaces painted on pieces of rough wood cut out are absurdly equipped with wheels or axes can thus move. Their name, close to that of Duchamp's roto reliefs, is obviously not innocent, although we are very far from the kinetic dynamics of the mentor.
However, the historical continuity does not stop there. When we analyze John Beech's work, as Gabriel Kübler1 remarks: We have a list of referents in the back of our head and whether we like it or not, we perceive something of Dada, Surrealist, New Realist, Pop Art, Minimal, Arte Povera, Radical Painting. The modern era, perpetual and vivacious avant-garde for a century has won the battle. Ready made, complex paradoxes, accumulations, simple geometric forms, ordinary materials, dynamics of space all resurface in the art of John Beech. With confidence, he acknowledges this heritage by mixing just the right amount of reference and innovation in challenging our sense of perception and memory.
Somewhere between pop art and Duchamp, Beech delivers a "minimal trash" version of abstraction as he brings form back to life by reconstructing it from the mundane. Formally abstract, he delivers "hardware" pieces encrusted with a raw reality, the very opposite of the general "clean & glossy" of minimal art. As Markus Verhagen points out in Modern Painters in 2005: The works are thus animated by an inherent contradiction and discreetly play with a conceptual flaw authorizing the artist to confer on them the serious status of work of art while the irony of his gesture refers at the same time to the fallibility of this very status.
John Beech refers to a shifted functionality of the object and scrambles the cards with malicious pleasure, shifting the angles of perception and challenging our Cartesian habits of categorizing everything. The real is the living matter that the artist experiments, tests -sort of thread to the conceptual elaboration which forbids him the formal confinement. From contingency, it becomes the base of an approach that never ceases to question the use and pleasure of art. If Beech is not a politician, he nevertheless speaks to us about the meaning and the function by rejecting any sacralization and vain sophistication. There is no more religion or chapel with him, the thought is free to move, to move.
However, John Beech's irreverence towards minimalism is always marked by a constitutive rigor while irony and ambiguity free it from any heaviness and ensure a poetic role. The beauty of gesture and the dialectic between function and dysfunction emphasize the necessary gratuity of art.