The Brooklyn Rail

What defines a landscape? Is it its location and, therefore, the border that confines it to a single place? Is it the people or things it carries? Is it the sensory experience it enables? Is it the histories it evokes? Is it the future it promises? In Kevin Beasley’s solo exhibition, All I thought / I loved, at Casey Kaplan, he responds to these inquiries through a new body of work, marked by his inaugural turn to art history’s famed protagonist: paint on canvas.

The exhibition opens, though, not with paint, but with three small vistas in Beasley’s established medium: raw cotton and dyed resin. From these small slab reliefs, we witness the process through which Beasley typically builds his compositions. First, in a mold placed on his studio floor, he sketches the foreground: a loose landscape drawn with a thin Sharpie. Layers of dyed resin and raw cotton are then laid upon this image, creating an ambient background that adds color and texture to form.

Through the inclusion of cotton, these vistas reference America's enslavement of Black people—specifically, Southern labor on plantations. Slavery did not merely accompany the nation’s rise: it generated it, holding an entire people as property and converting their forced labor into the wealth that crowned “King Cotton.” But this history is neither only economic, nor sealed in the past. Its afterlife persists, shaping how Black Americans inhabit and lay claim to land or, as Beasley puts it, “a contested site of belonging.”

Cotton holds a layer of personal significance for the artist; it was on his own family’s property in Valentines, Virginia, that he first encountered the crop, on land leased to local farmers. In response to that experience, and to the larger histories of slavery it evokes, Beasley’s vistas refuse the consolation of distance—the societal habit of fixing slavery at the safe, far end of a timeline that runs from then to now. Instead, cotton is present, serving as a witness to trauma that literally structures the landscapes in which Beasley resides and that he renders.

In Beasley’s new body of work, cotton re-appears in the disguised form of stretched canvases. Upon these surfaces, the artist uses acrylic to paint landscapes pulled from his memory: visual fragments from his family’s land and passing views on road trips through the Blue Ridge Mountains, among other places. However, by layering dyed resin upon the canvases’ surfaces, Beasley obscures these compositions. In a nod to Jack Whitten, the artist drags a plastic wedge across the quick-drying substance, blurring it.

Lacking an immediately tangible form, these large-scale canvases force a viewer to dig within their surfaces in search of grounding. Some works facilitate this more easily than others: in Down the land without a home (2026), my eye holds onto an obscured horizon line, quietly creeping across the canvas, accompanied by a murky scattering of what appear to be trees. And yet, without concentrated focus, this scenery falls out of consciousness entirely; foreground and background oscillate. Glossy and reflective, the milky resin glimmers as I lean in closer, attempting to grasp a landscape that has been intentionally obscured from me.

On Lake Gaston (2026) pushes even deeper into the realm of abstraction. The largely blue canvas does not explicitly trace the boundaries of a lake. Instead, it simply presents an expanse of color, defined by marginal shifts between warm and cool hues. Nonetheless, this surface—glassy and rippled—evokes the sensation of a cool body of deep water.

What differentiates these landscapes from those of Beasley’s earlier practice is not simply their being created on canvas with paint. Rather, it is the sequential process these materials enable. Instead of building up the work from front to back in a mold, Beasley now moves from back to front. These terms are not synonymous with background and foreground. In his new series, Beasley still begins with the form of the landscape (the foreground), followed by the addition of texture, color, and ambience (the background). But now, the atmosphere trumps the form of a place. With tangible context largely obscured, what remains is sensory—met first by the artist, who responds to the landscape he has painted by brushing and dragging resin across it, and then by us, who are given nothing of that landscape but the surface his gestures leaves behind.

A feature-length film, a song for the birds (2026), is projected in an adjacent gallery. In it, Beasley appears in his studio in Long Island City. His shoes squeak across the floor as he walks in and out of the frame to collect miscellaneous items—buckets, a pool filter, an electric keyboard—and place them in a tableau across a blank wall. Eventually, he sits down and plays the piano. Amplified notes turn into reverberating melodies that pulse through my chest and electrify the entire gallery. Afterwards, Beasley stands up and puts every object away, one by one, in reverse order. The film switches to an open green field where the artist appears again to repeat the same acts, this time his footsteps crunching through the grass. On a smaller screen nearby, in with no pain (2026), Beasley’s father ambles, slowly and without clear direction, across the family property.

Beasley’s strength has long rested in his ability to activate histories. Through materials, ranging from cotton to resin to sound, he sculpts a reality in which traumatic narratives are not relegated to the past, but instead structure how we see and exist. All I thought / I loved continues this work. Throughout the exhibition, Beasley traverses backwards and forwards—from foreground to background, from studio to field, and then back again. In doing so, he denies a throughline across time and space. His new landscapes’ refusal to fix any particular place deepens this: the atmospheres of many moments collapse into one. Through the traces of his hand across the resin-laid surfaces, the artist’s being appears bound to these stories. And as our bodies act as conduits for the sound waves echoing from the nearby films, we too are implicated in—unable to turn away from—larger narratives of collective trauma and endurance. Ultimately, in this space, there is a release from the need for a fixed passage that transitions pain to joy. Here, it can all coexist.

Beasley responds to the earlier questions—those probing what defines a landscape—by simply saying: yes. It is the people and the things, the atmosphere and the memories, the specific forms and the borderless expanse, the past and the present. It is all of this, all at once. Beasley refuses to accept a single direction.