Self-Portrait as a Stack of Books (May 2025)

Self Portrait as a Stack of Books
BEERS London
51 Little Britain
London, EC1A 7BH

Opening Preview: Thurs. 22 May 2025 (6-8pm)
Exhibition: 23 May – 28 June 2025

There’s something about a book you find by accident, a book no one else seems to have heard of, a book that thrills and then becomes a part of you, when it’s one you so easily might never have read at all – it seems like it found you. – Lisa Tuttle: My Death

Do we believe this sentiment? It’s a bit mystic, isn’t it? The book that finds you at the right moment. The poem that holds secrets to the universe? Or the song that speaks directly into your soul when you need it most. Andrew Salgado will tell you, Yes. He’d say: “Everybody has a book. Everybody has a painting. Sometimes it’s just a matter of looking, just a matter of finding it.”

Salgado is BEERS London’s longest-represented artist, and we are both thrilled and long overdue in presenting his second show in our current space, Self-Portrait As A Stack of Books. Like most of his titles; it’s a bit wink-wink nudge-nudge. It is colloquial but also hints toward something deeper, lurking under the surface. So too are his paintings built up from memory, composite images, and visual collages. His technique, too, shows the ghost of his decision-making: where a painted ridge, now obscured, now sublimated, shows a plane of colour where there once may have existed a doorway, window, or portal. This show might have just as indicatively been titled Self-Portrait As An Open Window or As A Smear of Paint. But for Salgado, the written word has proven increasingly important in his creative process. An avid reader, he credits various authors (Atwood, Borges, Daumal, Mantel, Nabokov, Schulz, Woolf, and Zweig) as major influences. “These authors are influenced by art. By music and painting. They write about it all the time. The word is ekphrasis. Like Nabokov lists over 150 paintings in his collected works. So why shouldn’t the inverse also be true?”

Asking Salgado about the intentions, symbolism, or directive in this collection of paintings – because it’s obviously ripe with his (now) trademark imagery – he becomes deferential, ambiguous, and almost evasive about everything from idea to technique, to presentation, and even the compelling title piece: a rare venture into sculpture which seems – whether through its books or its chair, or its uncanny, discombobulated human parts – to reference the paintings and even the act of painting itself. But also books. Words. Memory. Fallability. That head at the apex is glass. It’s his.

“Books are like time. An author you love is like a memory you cherish. How much time is enough time? There’s never enough time. That clock is always ticking. I always read blind. I never read a blurb or a summary, because every unread book is an infinite possibility. I chose a title called Glory, and I remember thinking, that’s a strange title. Glory. Glory could be about anything. Until I opened it up, until I actually started reading. Glory could be about everything.”

If paintings are chapters, viewers are invited to explore them in whatever order they like. As members of a larger audience, we supplant meaning into the books we read, we interpret meaning from the sentences we hear. “But it’s all there. It’s ready for the taking. And whatever you take from it – from the books, or the paintings, or the ideas within – it’s all right. It’s all correct. There are no wrong answers.”

Self-Portrait As A Stack of Books opens on 22 May 2025 at BEERS London, 51 Little Britain, London, EC1A 7BH. All are welcome from 6-8pm.

Salgado’s next exhibition will open on 20 November in Sydney, Australia, at Piermarq Art.