Scott Treleaven at Cooper Cole
Between 1996 and 1999, Scott Treleaven produced the influential zine This Is the Salivation Military, which regularly featured violent, black-and-white collages of male our bodies piled on high of each other. The artist would deal with every twink’s nubile torso with Eucharistic solemnity; like William S. Burroughs and David Wojnarowicz earlier than him, he present in homosexuality each the exquisitely seraphic and the totally profane.
Treleaven known as his artwork “queer pagan punk,” and, certainly, it shares with that description an edgy evasion of class at each flip. This restlessness pervades the colourful bucolics of “New Pagan Work,” the artist’s solo exhibition right here. Whereas the work could seem a far cry from Treleaven’s gritty, tongue-in-cheek zines and movies, his luxurious renderings of flora are possessed by the identical obstinate spirit. Seven nine-by-six-inch depictions of flowers and fruit, alongside two bigger, extra summary canvases, make up the present—nonetheless, all of those items are emphatically not nonetheless lifes.
Treleaven infuses every picture with a way of motion that approaches animism. The titular bloom of Untitled (geranium), 2023, is depicted in creamy impasto eddies of bone, pink, gold, and green_. _Swirls spiral upward from the stem on the backside of the portray, however Treleaven’s brushstrokes get weaker because the flower billows out on the canvas’s edge; nonetheless, the work churns with directional and textural exercise. Bulging blackberries in varied levels of ripeness adorn Little Gods Once more, 2023. They descend diagonally from the highest left nook of the composition, as if falling. Small strokes of white on their rounds make them seem succulent. Treleaven traces a wispy define across the swollen azure fruit within the portray’s middle; the light-green and yellow contouring makes the cluster vibrate. Untitled (ipomoea), 2022, is a close-up portrayal of a morning glory’s petals. Violet washes movement from a nebulous brown seed within the top-left quarter of the image. Sinuous shapes emerge within the spillage, turning the topic into its personal runny cosmos. Once more, this dynamism is exhausted solely by the top of the all-too-square canvas. With the pagan’s perception within the soul of all issues and the punk’s suspicion of custom, this work challenges the nonetheless life’s premise that life can ever be nonetheless.
