Between 1996 and 1999, Scott Treleaven produced the influential zine This Is the Salivation Army, which often featured violent, black-and-white collages of male bodies piled on top of one another. The artist would treat each twink’s nubile torso with Eucharistic solemnity; like William S. Burroughs and David Wojnarowicz before him, he found in homosexuality both the exquisitely seraphic and the utterly profane.
Treleaven called his art “queer pagan punk,” and, indeed, it shares with that description an edgy evasion of category at every turn. This restlessness pervades the colorful bucolics of “New Pagan Paintings,” the artist’s solo exhibition here. While the work may seem a far cry from Treleaven’s gritty, tongue-in-cheek zines and films, his sumptuous renderings of flora are possessed by the same obstinate 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 still lifes.
Treleaven infuses each image with a sense of movement that approaches animism. The titular bloom of Untitled (geranium), 2023, is depicted in creamy impasto eddies of bone, red, gold, and green. Swirls spiral upward from the stem at the bottom of the painting, but Treleaven’s brushstrokes get weaker as the flower billows out at the canvas’s edge; nonetheless, the work churns with directional and textural activity. Bulging blackberries in various stages of ripeness adorn Little Gods Again, 2023. They descend diagonally from the top left corner of the composition, as if falling. Small strokes of white on their rounds make them appear succulent. Treleaven traces a wispy outline around the swollen azure fruit in the painting’s center; 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 flow from a nebulous brown seed in the top-left quarter of the picture. Sinuous shapes emerge in the spillage, turning the subject into its own runny cosmos. Again, this dynamism is exhausted only by the end of the all-too-square canvas. With the pagan’s belief in the soul of all things and the punk’s suspicion of tradition, this work challenges the still life’s premise that life can ever be still.
