Scott Treleaven

COOPER COLE is pleased to present New Pagan Paintings by Scott Treleaven. 

This marks Treleaven’s third solo exhibition at the gallery, for which Derek McCormack has written the following text:

Deathly – this is how flower paintings struck Treleaven for the longest time – the flowers under duress, their viewers under duress to value them. He was interested in dispersing this duress, so he started painting flowers himself, and this show features the nasturtiums, sunflowers, geraniums and morning glories that captured him. “I turned to flowers,” he says, “to find out what made me resist painting them.” There are nine paintings in ‘New Pagan Paintings,’ all finished in the last few years. The blooms are what you’ll notice first, then the light: light’s shining on them and light seems to be shining from them. They’re alive – it’s animism, though that’s not the point of the paintings; it’s the starting point. If he grants that flowers have spirits, then what spirit will they grant him? If they have spirit, then surely part of their spirit is perverse. These paintings are pagan in that they’re full of a particular spirit: petalled and petulant, hermaphroditic and horny – to me, they suggest what we might get if Joe Brainard paintings buggered Charles Burchfield paintings – paradise! These are cultured flowers with the souls of wildflowers or weeds. When he started painting them a few years ago, he realized that they’d been lurking for a long time. Even in his previous body of work – in his Jewel/Galaxy paintings, he’d drawn flowers on his canvases then painted over them, as if paint were soil, and as if every part of a flower were a seed. In ‘New Pagan Paintings,’ in these stellar paintings, flowers star: they swarm over the surface; indeed, they are the surface. I might also mention that there’s also a painting of a berry, which shouldn’t surprise any of Treleaven’s admirers: everything in his work’s fruity as fuck.

– Derek McCormack’s most recent books are Castle Faggot (Semiotext(e)), a novel, and Judy Blame’s Obituary (Pilot Press) a collection of essays on fashion and death.

Scott Treleaven (b. 1972 Canada) first came to attention in the late 90s via a series of experimental films and underground zines. A constantly shifting approach to creation has become the defining aspect of a practice that has, over the past two decades, encompassed abstract drawing and painting, sculpture, photography and collage. Rather than adhere to mediums, tenets or genres, Treleaven’s work hinges on uncertainty, transformation and multiplicity as it seeks to describe and evolve an alternate (and ontologically queer) history of art making; one that originates as part of a transcendental, rather than purely formal, tradition.

Solo exhibitions include: Cooper Cole, Toronto (2023, 2020, 2018, 2017); Invisible-Exports, New York (2018, 2015, 2013, 2011); The Suburban, Milwaukee (2017); The Breeder, Athens (2009); and John Connelly Presents, New York (2008, 2006). Group exhibitions include: Brooklyn Museum (forthcoming 2023); XYZ Collective, Tokyo (2018); MOCA Tucson (2018); 80WSE, New York (2016); Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (2014); ICA Philadelphia (2013); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2012); ICA London (2012); Galleria d’Arte Contemporanea di Monfalcone, Italy (2007); and Artists Space, New York (2005). Treleaven’s publications are included in historical overviews such as Copy Machine Manifesto (Phaidon/Brooklyn Museum 2023); Showboat: Punk, Sex, Bodies (Dashwood 2016); The Magazine – Documents of Contemporary Art Series (MIT Press 2015); and In Numbers: Serial Publications by Artists Since 1955 (JRP|Ringier 2009). Treleaven currently lives and works in Toronto, Canada.

The artist acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Toronto Arts Council.