Beverly Acha

Born 1987 Miami, Florida

Rooted in observation, her work captures the intangible sensorial and psychological experience of space through color and repetition.

Selected Works

Beverly Acha

My practice is grounded in process. I make oil paintings, frescos, drawings, and prints using an abstract visual language and develop my work in series. As I work, I respond to the parameters set by each material and medium, sensitive to the ways in which materials touch, influence, and transform each other and the ways time, scale, and space can be (or not be) developed by each medium. Each work begins with a color, shape, or series of marks that resonate in the moment. I then begin a process of call and response with myself, building the painting (or drawing or print) layer by layer, translating physical experience into 2-dimensional mark. My process is improvisational, a continuous engagement with myself at each moment.

I approach abstraction as a language of symbols that can better speak to felt and embodied experience than representation. Traces, fragments, and fleeting experiences of places and memories generate my images. Shapes emerge from observations of the environments in which I live and work: the natural world, the architecture I move through, and the body’s memories and sensations. I’m interested in the fluidity between rational “seeing” (as a form of knowing and naming) and “seeing” which escapes language, the later being one that contains multitudes of experience, time, and space, and which can also be described as psychological or spiritual.

Formally my paintings refer to the language of diagrams, maps, the history of abstraction, landscape/physical spaces we occupy, and the body. Color in my paintings point to atmosphere, time of day, and light in space. Shapes and forms reference architecture/structure, objects, botanical forms, and body parts. Repetition often calls upon movement and vibrations (sound/music, energy, invisible wavelengths). 

I seek out moments of instability in our reality such as in echoes, reflections, mirrors, time, and technology. In each of these, repetition plays a central role in the distortion of the “real”. Repetition of color, line, and form in my work point towards a state of delirium, movement, and/or passing time through its activation of the haptic. My work is influenced by science fiction and its world making and the way concrete language becomes porous in poetry.

Exhibitions

Exhibition

April 25, 2023

Related

Fair

November 9, 2023