‘New Pagan Paintings’ - Opens April 1  at Cooper Cole [West Gallery] 

‘New Pagan Paintings’ - opens April 1  at Cooper Cole [West Gallery] 

Little Gods Again (2023) oil on canvas, 9 x 6”

Very grateful to the extraordinary Derek McCormack for the exhibition text below:  “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.