CURATOR’S PICKS

Beau Regard is an exhibition about looking, and the pleasure of being allowed to look. The title plays on two meanings: a beautiful view, and a beautiful gaze. Across Rockefeller’s paintings, pools shimmer beneath impossible skies, landscapes stretch towards the horizon, and figures linger in moments of solitude, intimacy and desire.

Summer sets the scene for Beau Regard like an aerial shot opening a film. The world appears from above, already in motion, yet suspended in time. One can almost hear the cicadas; one expects a voice-over to begin. 

Warm fauvist colours immediately announce the exhibition’s visual language. The vivid palette, loose brushwork and rhythmic strokes recall French painter André Derain and his incandescent paintings of L’Estaque. 

We, the gazers, seem to occupy an elevated vantage point, quietly observing the partially dressed sunbathers and strollers below. They do not appear to know that they are being watched. The scene is languid, sun-drenched and faintly voyeuristic.

In the Lost in LA series, Rockefeller turns the act of looking into the subject itself. 

A fully dressed man stands close to us, his back turned, watching a woman positioned in the distance. She appears to have her back to him, just as he has his back to us. We are all watching someone who does not know – or perhaps pretends not to know – that they are being watched.

The pool itself becomes almost symbolic: a luxury so completely taken for granted that it recedes into the background, leaving the true object of desire elsewhere.

In Lost in LA III, the observer has moved even closer. He stands in the immediate foreground, so close to us that his legs disappear beyond the lower edge of the frame. Across the distance, the woman faces him. She must know the man is present and watching, yet she remains far away – whether by circumstance or by choice. 

Rockefeller renders the figures in broad, block-like forms reminiscent of Nicolas de Staël. Their features are deliberately effaced. Faces dissolve into planes of colour; identities become indeterminate. They could know each other intimately, or they could be complete strangers.

The View is the pièce de résistance of Beau Regard – Rockefeller’s most ambitious painting in the exhibition both scale and conception, measuring 150 × 252 cm. It is a work that seems to invite entry as the landscape stretches before us with such physical presence that we could almost step into it. 

The setting might be Provence: a sun-drenched landscape of trees, foliage and expansive space. Yet there is one striking absence: there are no people. The trees, with their sinuous branches and supple foliage, seem to assume the role of human figures. They possess gesture, rhythm and character. In the absence of human protagonists, they replace them. 

Stylistically, the painting departs significantly from the works that precede it, revealing another side of Rockefeller’s practice and the breadth of his painterly language. If Summer functions as the opening shot of Beau Regard, The View feels like the closing credits sequence.