MIRRORS

Mirrors is the first solo show by Adam Beris at LA BIBI + REUS, consisting of a series of paintings created by applying paint directly from the tube onto the canvas. Inspired by slot machine imagery and an overabundance of old and “expiring” paint, each painting is built using an ambiguous codex of symbols, shapes, characters, food, ideas, and abstractions.

Inserted at the painter’s eye level is a pair of caricatured eyeballs, as if they were a reflection of the viewer attempting to construct a narrative and/or decipher the imagery in front of them. However, the paintings are not created with any specific narrative in mind — the symbols are assembled based on aesthetic decisions, leaving viewers to discover and create associations between shape and object. Within these grids, viewers construct their own meanings, fictions, and anecdotes.

The narrative dimension involves the active implication of the spectator within the painting itself, which moves beyond its pictorial and material nature to become a mirror in which the viewer does not observe a faithful representation of their anatomy, but rather a reflection of their subjectivity, their life, and the way they become the observer of their own world. In this sense, the relationships between the various elements — created through the accumulation of paint — generate meanings that shift depending on who is standing in front of each canvas that forms the exhibition.

The paintings presented function as hieroglyphs and, as such, derive meaning from the simplicity of the elements they contain. A quick glance leads, at first, to indecipherable combinations, with the titles as the only clues: a bay, edibles, song titles, a lawn, a drug dealer, or a city in California. Starting from these small hints, if we focus our gaze, we begin to find paths through which to travel within our own subjectivity, leading to an exchange between our eyes and those recreated in the painting. In Beris’s work, the simplicity of the elements is synonymous with narrative — not predetermined, but generated through individual introspection.