Aesthetics and Surrealism

Published on October 11th, 2016

Aesthetics and Surrealism

It was only when Jacques de Beaufort slowed down his career in 2013 that uncommon creativity took shape inside his Lake Worth gallery. The painter spent that year uniting Palm Beach’s rowdy art and music tribes under his UNIT1 gallery, a friends-only, self-described “man-cave” that catered to group exhibits and music by local bands he admired. Buddies trickled in and out at will: members of Raggy Monster, Spred the Dub, singer Mykel Morrison, sculptor Woody Othello. For one exhibit, “Art By Musicians,” Kimmy Drake of Beach Day, Ates Isildak of the Band in Heaven and 15 others took turns rocking the easel. And when he ended his Unit1 experiment in 2015, he created “Deep Inside the Man-Cave,” a series of yearbook-style drawings of the quirky and musical dudes in his life.

It is de Beaufort’s stint as a ringmaster of Palm Beach’s circus of cool that partly inspires his first solo exhibition, “Aesthetics and Surrealism,” a 10-year retrospective opening Nov. 18 at the Box Gallery in West Palm Beach. The roundup of 50-odd works spans the close-knit scenesters of “Deep Inside the Man-Cave” to topless, surrealistic portraits of women to Dali-esque landscapes, populated by floating eyeballs, knotted trees and monolithic face statues. He will also debut a new performance-art piece titled “Macroaggression,” featuring 20 nude men and women covered in red and blue body paint that will stroll the gallery holding machetes and pitchforks.

There will, of course, be live music. Fort Lauderdale retro fuzz-rock quartet Fat Sun and West Palm Beach psych garage-rockers Peyote Coyote, both friends of de Beaufort’s, will perform. “It’s a small world down here,” says de Beaufort, also a filmmaker and visual-arts professor at Palm Beach State College. “I like the whole psych-rock genre and feel like it’s the best fit for the surrealist-fantasy element in my work. I know members of both bands from working on videos or featuring them in UNIT1 shows. I did the album cover for Fat Suns’ new record. And Ryan Huseman, the lead singer in Peyote Coyote, was a student of mine a few years ago.”