Beira Paintings

14 – 26 February 2026 Opening: Saturday 14 February, 17:30 Exhibition included in the Investec Cape Town Art Fair VIP Program Strauss&Co 2nd Floor, Brickfield Canvas, 35 Brickfield Road, Woodstock, Cape Town BEIRA PAINTINGS by Francesco Ozzola The  Beira Paintings Exhibition by Peter Eastman presents a series of artworks that explore the tension between invisibility and revelation. Painted within the darkness of the Scottish winter, these dark, layered canvases invite viewers to contemplate light as a distant, almost remembered force. Rather than being directly inspired by the Scottish landscape, the works reflect on the experience of South African light when one is no longer immersed in it, allowing light to emerge from depth, absence, and contrast. In a state of slow, perceptually active immersion, Eastman’s images present themselves as fleeting apparitions, caught between memory and intuition. Each canvas captures specific, unrepeatable atmospheric and luminous conditions, emphasizing that seeing is an interpretative, mobile, and unstable act. Radical works of Peter Eastman, where the interplay between the forest and light remains in constant transformation. This exhibition offers a unique opportunity to experience contemporary art that challenges conventional perceptions and captivates the viewer. Peter Eastman’s Beira Paintings operate at the threshold of visibility.  Built through dark, stratified surfaces, these canvases do not represent the forest as landscape but as a resistant visual field, where light acts less as illumination than as an event that briefly allows form to surface.   Trunks, branches, and reflections appear without stabilizing into image. The eye moves across the density of the painting searching for orientation, yet every point of balance remains provisional. Seeing here is not immediate but negotiated over time.  The forest becomes an autonomous presence, indifferent to the viewer’s desire for clarity. Each painting records a singular atmospheric condition, suggesting that vision is always contingent — the result of an encounter between body, space, and duration.  Eastman’s work asks for sustained attention. Images do not assert themselves; they unfold gradually, revealing painting as a temporal experience rather than a fixed representation.