Julie Beaufils et l'éternité

I was recently led down a rabbit hole through perusing the contents of an ARTFORUM email. I  enjoy these peregrinations. Like Alice, I too, like to fall gently through hitherto unknown rabbit holes.

I was reading about the hugely successful Californian artist, Laura Owens, who is currently showing her work in Arles at the Vincent Van Gogh Foundation (or something like that). A few Parisian artists were also mentioned in the article, one of whom was Julie Beaufils.

So I continued further along, down into the Rabbit Hole, and discovered the work of Julie Beaufils, specifically in a YouTube video in which speaks (naturally) about her work. It's curious work, I would like to see it on walls to really be able to experience it, but it's clear that she is a painter with great feeling and ideas.

What prompts this small post is that in the YouTube clip I saw, (Artist Says: Julie Beaufils for Gallery Weekend Beijing), she says something I have never heard during my visits to so many web sites, blogs, videos, and what not, concerning other contemporary artists.

It is under three minutes so it's easy to watch, (and the piano music is a sweet knock-off of Yann Thierson's work for the Amélie). 

What struck me was that I heard Julie talk about how her work would be viewed, felt, looked at, perhaps understood, perhaps not, in the future. She cited ten years, then fifteen years as examples. I have never before heard anyone ruminate in this way about their own work, and I found it refreshingly honest. She pondered whether her work would have meaning in the future for someone else who might come from a different culture.

Essentially, her question is; Does this work have Universal Appeal? I am so happy to hear this sensitive woman, of the younger generation, ask these kinds of questions.  

This idea of The Universal was so important in my own education which I received from Léo Marchutz. Because his ideas of art were so vast his sentences would extend over centuries at a time pulling together Rembrandt, Van Gogh and Thomas Hardy all together, easily, and freely.  

So, I really liked hearing Ms. Beaufils discuss her work in a time not yet arrived.