It’s a hot, slow summer, somewhere in the suburbs. The young girls—and occasional guys—in Kelly Beeman’s paintings, drawings, and watercolors are taking it easy: sunbathing, eating a slice of watermelon, dozing in the backseat of the car, sipping cherry limeades by the pool. They go for strolls and stargaze. When it’s raining they retreat indoors, gazing wistfully out the window into the backyard. These scenes of summertime idling are familiar, but also hazy and strange, like a memory or dream. Most notably, the female characters are all impossibly identical, longlimbed brunettes with feline eyes and perfect pink pouts. The boys, muscular and wavy-locked, could be their brothers. And Beeman includes few clues as to the exact location or time period, beyond the odd phone or vehicle. Everything is rendered in simplified lines and patterns, planes of muted color that skirt on the edge of geometric abstraction.

Yet the faces and figures in these new works—and the world in which they swish and float about—are as serenely charming as ever. In conversation, Beeman laughs about the suspicion that beauty is often met with in contemporary art circles. The visual pleasure of her pictures is deliberate and hard-won, the result of a meticulous process of sketching and reworking compositions until the elements are all in harmony, ready to be translated onto canvas or archival-quality paper. But then, as Beeman points out, perhaps suspicion is an appropriate reaction, because complete harmony does not exist in reality. Beeman’s carbon-copied girls and boys are like the mythical nymphs and sirens of Pre-Raphaelite paintings: seductive, and interchangeable, illusions of youth and loveliness. They do not sweat or betray a hint of discomfort— In Rollercoaster, the woman’s shiny hair flows perfectly in the wind, while in Park Bench she sits back in her evening gown, not a crease in sight. No one has ever looked so unruffled in a heatwave. As Beeman has put it: “It’s not true or real, but our desire for it is.”

From another perspective, the repeated faces—symmetrical and nearly expressionless—are not unlike masks. What, then, is the more complicated truth beneath the shadowless surface? What was it that led to the close, possibly protective, embrace in Mother and Child? Who is the girl on the red dress speaking to in Telephone, and is she happy about it or not? Might the idealization of these images be an example of that psychological phenomenon known as rosy retrospection—when our recollections somehow look much better than our present experiences? The titles of the works, factually descriptive, offer little by way of context. In Beeman’s art, the viewer is left to fill in the gaps: to project their own feelings, associations, and memories of summers past.

—Gabrielle Schwarz