William Josh Beck
A song of ink (Un chant d'encre)
William-Josh Beck's work is rooted in a minimalist approach, where the line reveals time and movement.
Extending his primary practice of ink on paper, he develops, through photography, video, performance, and sculpture, a dialogue between trace, full line, and spaces of whiteness or emptiness.
Anchored by his musical practice, his ink-on-paper abstraction proceeds through the transmission of sound energy in the brushstroke. In a black and white dichromatic scheme, the aim is not to paint what can be seen, but what is heard: to transcribe the essence of the sound flow—music, acoustic landscape—into pictorial material.
His compositions notably take the form of large polyptychs composed of modular paper panels. Within a geometric mesh that structures the pictorial space, the flow of the line crosses edges, lines, and boundaries, playing on the tension between the rigour of the format and the freedom of the gesture.
William-Josh Beck exposes his creative process to the public through live painting performances, in collaboration with musicians for whom he composes, or in a dynamic of free improvisation. In the latter mode, a constant interplay rises between the instrument and the brush, the painting emerging from the music, the music springing from the graphic dimension of the ink stroke, which can be interpreted as a free-form score.
Sensitive to the vibration of spaces, Beck intervenes in situ to design immersive installations where auditory and visual perception intertwine. Using field recordings in the environment of exhibition venues, he composes soundscapes that he then paints in ink. These multi-sensory and meditative installations immerse the viewer in an intimate resonance between abstract landscape painting and the sonic environment.
While the thematic and material articulation of the four elements—air, water, earth, and fire—infuses his whole universe, it is particularly perceptible in his photography. William-Josh Beck captures the trace of time in nature, whether in the curve drawn by the passage of water, writing the life of water within the body of the earth, or in the negative of photonic movements on the photographic plate.
In video, the filmed material of his inks transmute into moving landscapes through filtering and tracking shots. The image is interwoven with sound compositions whose material, drawn from the music that inspired the painted work, is shaped into an auditory journey.
In constant metamorphosis, these abstractions trace evolving cartographies that summon the imagination of the scars of human activity on the environment: patterns of earthworks, networks of canals and roads. The effusive currents of liquid ink evoke oil spills or ghostly forms of carbon smoke and clouds.
Modularity is currently at the heart of his research in sculpture and ceramics, where, echoing his painted polyptychs, repeated volumes provide a serial framework for a minimal gesture.
Creating in a preserved environment, between sea and forest, his practice harmonizes with this ecosystem through an ecological attention to materials: water, soot ink, mulberry and soft wood paper, new bio-sourced materials. Yet his commitment is part of an approach articulated with digital technologies—video, 3D modeling,—testifying to a contemporary grounding in today’s creative forms.