BEEZY BAILEY: The Love Revolution

BEEZY BAILEY | THE LOVE REVOLUTION | 3 – 24 APRIL 2021

It is through pain that the metal of growth is forged.
The virus and the false news of starved spirits sing a thin song on social media.
We are so alone even when we are together.

So I go into the magic garden of my studio and, like a bee, I pollinate paintings, trying to make sense and ultimately beauty of what is before me.

For every degree of darkness in a painting or in the world, there has to be an inverse degree of light, so that we can see it all.
So it is light that I search for – light of the flame of humanity, light that has to shine out of my paintings.

Love is the only thing that can save our lost sad dark world.

And a universal hoping that one can be electrified by the radiant stories of art.

That is the Love Revolution.

Beezy Bailey
Cape Town

It is not surprising, in the context of our preoccupation with a pandemic and possibly at the pinnacle of our most narcissistic epoch, that Beezy Bailey should extrude an exhibition titled The Love Revolution. Bailey has always championed art as a balm for weary, saddened souls. With humanity universally exhausted, wounded and wary, we are all in need of soul muti (medicine). It takes a special kind of creative to exhort us to our highest good – love. For what love demands first and foremost is imagination and trust, and Bailey has that in spades.

In this exhibition, Bailey transports us through inner sanctums, outer worlds and other planets.

Here his protagonists gallivant, fly, cavort, dance or are periodically still, at rest. They stare at the sun or stare out at their audience curiously.

Indeed one cannot engage with Bailey’s work without being transported into another magical reality which insists one asks the question “What if…?”

I believe this demand on our imagination is the very same impulse that we have to engage in order to overcome the many obstacles in our path as human beings existing during a pandemic.

Though a vaccine requires scientific know-how, it also requires ingenuity and vision to even conceive of its existence. Similarly, imagination will be the cornerstone of our organic solution to the chronic constipation of mass polarisation and global climate change.  

By presenting the preposterous, the impossible, the extraordinary, Bailey invites us to re-examine our notions of possibility, stretch the limits of our fatigued imaginations and to move away from the fear and hatred, all the while exhorting us to live and love and laugh aloud – to join the revolution!

 - Charles Shields

This is Beezy Bailey’s 12th solo exhibition at Everard Read, and his first major one in four years, since the 2016 inaugural exhibition of Cape Town’s CIRCA Gallery, The 1,000 Year Dance Cure.

*Face masks are required and must be worn at all times when visiting the gallery

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THE EXHIBITION HAS BEEN EXTENDED UPSTAIRS AT CIRCA UNTIL 24th APRIL 

VIDEO BY: SIDE FILM PRODUCTIONS - CHRISTIAAN ROSSOUW, RUAN KOTZE & LIONEL SMIT

IMAGES BY MICHAEL HALL