By Ginder Danto, Art critic and writer
The arrogance of those finer impulses that lead an artist to the studio, the hand to a paintbrush, and the latter's newly matted whiskers to the canvas to make the merest line or dot, comes of a primal need. It is a need prescribed by the same matter that drives an artist elsewhere intent on making food or making love, on striking up conversation or otherwise communing with the external world. And it is equally vital, indeed irremediable, as it is the way by which the artist lives in the world, and necessarily distills past, present and anticipated aspects of existence.
Such need is identified, however, less in the artist's persona than in the personality of the work, less in the proverbial furrows of the brow or the paint-masked fingers than in the place called art where all that physiological imperative is expressed. In the work of Beate Renner, the need is violent, as evidenced in the broad canvases she prefers to deply her swaths and traces and often cryptic articulations of vivid color. "I have trouble," she says, "with the small format," referring to something that is nevertheless half the size of a generic bedroom wall - what most might perceive as a fully plausible frame within which to communicate even an expansively artful idea. But Renner's ideas are further boundless, manifold, complex and copious. They are ideas about being. So that to contain them is incompatible. That their interpretation is illustrated through the medium of painting is already a compromise. That, like the walls where they're hung, paintings must tangibly begin and end, is apparently a nuisance. Left to her own devices, she would paint the walls of the world.
In deference to logistic limitations, Renner depicts a more personal universe - with all the attendant memories and musings of experience, education, appetite and ennui. (...) The operative notion in Renner's work is that of a 'scape', variously ascribed to land or sea or some other milieu. Perhaps astral-or internal. The application - and occasional titles define the specific sentimental or psychological terrain - is the depiction of a more circumscribed area.
Thus Renner guides us to these places, inviting us to enter via any number of portals painted in, like the names of towns or rivers or divides symbolizing such actual landmarks on a map. These demarcations made of now hollow spaces, now depths of shade, now a linear pharse (. . . ) - all suggest like some private legend something within, something beyond, the immediate scenery. The specific choice of conduit is ours. The destination is discovery. The surprise is that we find ourselves, through Renner's at once intimate and universal mode of seeking.
In a style that has wilfully evolved from the predominantly figurative to the abstract, Renner has paid allegiance to the various legacies that have undeniably served her inspiration. She credits Pollock with those swift trajectories of liquid color sent splattering on some subject; she remembers to Gauguin his tropical hues, and to Rembrandt his untennably-lit darkness, and to Van Gogh, all, including folly. But it is to Renner's credit that she has not stalled along these amalgamated episodes in art history to forge her own painterly way, incorporating but never emptily imitating such hallowed material. Her resolute path presupposes a passion, itself born of need, motive, desire. The works collected here attest to Renner's posession of all these impulses fundamental to the artist who, once in the studio, perenially reinvents our reason for being.