For nearly 60 years John Beard has walked a tightrope between representation and abstraction, resulting in a dynamic oeuvre which explores alternative approaches to landscape, portraiture and history painting. His landscapes – the subject of his 2025 exhibition at Messums West – continue the conversation begun with impressionism, where the physical world is depicted through the play of light, presented through saturated colour. The title of the exhibition: ‘Qualia’, refers to the subjective, qualitative characteristics of sensations the way things seem to us – in contrast to propositional attitudes, where the focus is on beliefs about experience rather than what it is directly like to experience something. Qualia are often referred to as the phenomenal properties of experience, and experiences that have qualia are referred to as being phenomenally conscious. This is the subject of John Beard’s work, which emphasises, above all, the subjective nature of painting.

Inspired by artists such as Paul Cèzanne, and the writings of the Romantic poet Rainer Maria Rilke, he seeks amongst visible things equivalents to his inner vision, projecting his internal thoughts, feelings and experiences onto the landscapes he observes. The Qualia are experienced by the artist from the exterior of infinite space along coastlines to the interiority of his own secluded garden. This exhibition will include a wide selection of paintings by Beard created all over the world from the early 1990s to the present.

‘For a long time, I was quite unable to paint Sainte-Victoire; I had no idea how to go about it because, like others who just look at it, I imagined the shadow to be concave, whereas in fact it’s convex, it disperses outward from the centre. Instead of accumulating, it evaporates, becomes fluid, bluish, participating in the movements of the surrounding air.’
—Joachim Gasquet, Cézanne: A Memoir with Conversations