By Helen Miller

Beaux Mendes is an artist who plays brilliantly with ambiguity, who challenges us to see as much as we can in images that invite, and reward, scrutiny.

Beaux Mendes, The Manzanita Loop at the Miguel Abreu Gallery, 88 Eldridge Street, NYC, through November 9.

Just when you thought Cezanne’s legacy couldn’t become anymore interesting, or S&M for that matter, The Manzanita Loop, Beaux Mendes’ second solo show at Miguel Abreu Gallery, wraps tree trunks in ribbons and unfurls twenty-five enchanting paintings ‘neo-en-plein-air’.

Mendes studied at UCLA and Bard, as well as the Art Students League of New York, which is known for its atelier style training in traditional techniques. In the latest chapter of their hybrid practice between the studio and the woods, Mendes depicts the distinctive trees of the Manzanita Mountains, part of the Angeles Forest, in seasonal extremes — from the depths of winter to the peak heat of summer.

These polarities elegantly undergird other pairings in Mendes’ show. In a single row across two high-ceilinged galleries and an adjacent hallway, dark, layered paintings alternate with lighter pictures in animal hide and half chalk ground. One painting often resembles another inside out. Bare canvas or linen appears like sun on wood or snow banks in fairy tales, in gestures that recall the “unmark” Cezanne is often credited with discovering for modern painting.

Translucent layers create space in compact compositions. On one of the larger wood panels, a tree-like figure grows in all four cardinal directions. Its gnarled and knotty center harbors faces in a pareidolic fashion. Wood stain washes lend a yellow glow while deepening marks made in charcoal. Depending on how you look at it, clitoral, vulvar shapes fan into a rather magnificent upside-down cone headdress.

A single painting on the central wall has the energy of an altarpiece. It is in fact the largest painting in the show at 37 ¼ x 54 ½ inches, in oil and mixed media on half chalk ground on linen. It appears to depict the ribbon-wrapped specimen in the photograph featured on the exhibition postcard. In the top right and left quadrants, the adorned branches reach with the ligamentous stretch of a wrenched chicken bone. Their gaping bark recalls famous anatomical illustrations such as “Muscles of the Back: Partial Dissection of a Seated Woman,” a 1746 mezzotint by Jacques-Fabien Gautier d’Agoty, in which the rib cage of a ruddy, very-much-alive young woman springs open like a loosened corset.

Mendes’ boxy framing might be a fanciful illustration of stolen pleasures on the brink of climate breakdown. The close-up cropping indicates an innocent view, but the work comes off as subversive. A wolf den or dark womb located at the bottom of several paintings can be identified, after repeated looks, to be the head of a fallen, foreshortened figure at the base of a tree. The boundary between the figure’s legs and the tree’s sprawling branches is indecipherable. Each picture in this series is painted in a dense-wood fall palette. In the smallest, only 12 x 12 inches, an excess of oil or turpentine, or something painted on the other side of the goatskin parchment, has created a beautiful bruised effect.

The more you look at these works, the more amorphously suggestive they become. The mandate here is not to see what is, as with traditional representation, or even to represent what is seen, as with impressionism, but to see what isn’t, or what might be, or what possibly could be obscene. In another elegantly muddy piece from 2020, someone’s thighs (or multiple peoples’ thighs) energetically crawl up the painting (or bed, or rock face). In a more intimate work from 2024, the view shifts upwards. One figure appears lying down like a tidy Rodin dancer, who is definitely (or probably, or maybe not) having sex with the other, who is possibly a fox.

2024’s David Copperfield: The Disappearing Man, a distemper painting on linen, is the second largest and only titled work in the show. On first impression, it seems to be the most straightforward and cohesive as well. On closer look, however, we remember that Copperfield was a magician best known for his disappearing act. Here we find a version of him who, across the expanse of the canvas, appears to become less — or more — than human. Each manifestation of him is vaguer than the last, before the anthropomorphic shape disappears entirely into the blue-gray night.

At a certain point, discovering connections feels like a game. A gorgeous CNC-routed Purpleheart wood relief repeats the form of an earlier piece composed of CNC-routed MDF covered in sheepskin parchment. The slick surface of the latter is as arresting as the exposed wood in the former. Both appear as representations of the land in near-raw materials made close to the earth — from trees and sheep. The precise if unfamiliar and even unique shapes remind us that CNC is short for Computer Numerical Control and that pre-programmed software directs these cuts. Both pieces play with scale — a kind of Bonsai effect — calling to mind snow-covered terrain and a contour map. In the Purpleheart relief, the profile view of a face sooner or later appears amidst the tree rings, rendering them into the contour lines of a cheek, chin, and forehead, further complicating the tools and techniques at play. Upon reflection, the same profile can be seen in the sheepskin covered MDF — even without the benefit of contour lines, and thanks, in part, to shadows and creases where the off-white material has been pulled around the back of the board.

I can’t stop thinking about the exhibition’s centerpiece, its image of a two-part trunk wrapped in ribbons resembling plastic trail markers, and twisted branches braced like bent wrists or arched backs (relatively flat, formless, genderless, wonderfully indistinct places on the body). The half chalk ground half glistens; the chalk absorbs the light; the crystals in the reconstituted animal hide sparkle; each thing is one thing and another. Brushstrokes, wiped and clotted, of flesh pink, fresh red, and bloody brown have been applied at expert angles. The implication is that of a perpetual wrapping and unwrapping. The undulating, overlapping torsos of dancers in Meurtrière (2019) from The Bare Life by French filmmaker Philippe Grandrieux come to mind — their desirous transformations, which crest over and over again, but never climax.

In “Freud’s Cezanne” (1995) — an essay on the painter’s grand, celebrated paintings of outsized bathers — T. J. Clark describes the “transparent” and “double figures” in the streamside scenes, with buttocks and shoulders that keep flipping or turning into one another. He argues that the indeterminacy of what we might now call “embodiment” simultaneously disrupted and propelled Cezanne’s determination to capture what he saw once and for all. Each stroke inevitably fell short of conveying the painter’s vision — which, of course, was infused with his other senses, thoughts, imagination, and famous doubt. While believing that knowledge could be arrived at through sensory experience, Cezanne was busy demonstrating otherwise, and generating alternatives, however preliminary, to a dogmatic, instrumental understanding of perception.

The second to last painting in The Manzanita Loop captures a screensaver of simple arches endlessly inscribed against an emerald green backdrop. On first encounter, this gem didn’t grab my attention, as it is anything but embodied; but then I remembered how brilliantly Mendes plays with ambiguity, challenging us to see as much as we can in images that invite scrutiny. Looking closer, I realized that these are actually fallen arches, dropped as building blocks in an early video game, and that they tell, however irreverently, a story of belabored progress. They also play on a loop, and fill the down time between internet searches, like an unmarked territory.

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Helen Miller is an artist. She teaches at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and Harvard Summer School.