Between 1996 and 1999, Scott Treleaven produced the influential zine It’s the army of salivation, which often featured violent black-and-white collages of male bodies stacked on top of each other. The artist treated the nubile torso of each twink with Eucharistic solemnity; like William S. Burroughs and David Wojnarowicz before him, he found in homosexuality both the exquisitely seraphic and the absolutely profane.
Treleaven has called his art “queer pagan punk” and, indeed, he shares with that description an edgy escape from the category at every turn. This restlessness permeates the colorful bucolic of “New Pagan Paintings”, the artist’s solo exhibition here. Although the work may seem far removed from the gritty, tongue-in-cheek zines and films of Treleaven, its lavish renditions of flora are possessed by the same stubborn spirit. Seven nine-by-six-inch depictions of flowers and fruit, alongside two larger, more abstract canvases, make up the show – however, all of these pieces are emphatically not dead natures.
Treleaven infuses each image with a sense of movement that borders on animism. Flowering holder Untitled (geranium), 2023, is depicted in creamy impasto swirls of bone, red, gold and green_. _Swirls spiral upwards from the stem at the bottom of the painting, but Treleaven’s brushstrokes weaken as the flower swells at the edge of the canvas; nonetheless, the work is bubbling with directional and textural activity. Domed blackberries in various stages of ripeness adorn More little gods, 2023. They descend diagonally from the upper left corner of the composition, as if falling. Small dashes of white on their circles make them look succulent. Treleaven draws a wispy outline around the puffy azure fruit in the center of the painting; the light green and yellow outline makes the cluster vibrate. Untitled (ipomoea), 2022, is a close-up depiction of the petals of a morning glory. Purple washes flow from a nebulous brown seed in the upper left quarter of the image. Sinuous shapes emerge from the spill, transforming the subject into its own drooling cosmos. There again, this dynamism is only exhausted at the end of the too square canvas. With pagan belief in the soul of all things and punk’s distrust of tradition, this work challenges the still life premise that life can always be still.
