INVISIBLE-EXPORTS is pleased to present Scott Treleaven’s The Holy Man Who Drank Milk With His Penis.
* * *
Scott Treleaven's work is synonymous with multidisciplinary explorations of sensuality, esoterica, and marginal culture. Over the past two years he has been moving steadily away from the ... Read more
INVISIBLE-EXPORTS is pleased to present Scott Treleaven’s The Holy Man Who Drank Milk With His Penis.
- * *
Scott Treleaven’s work is synonymous with multidisciplinary explorations of sensuality, esoterica, and marginal culture. Over the past two years he has been moving steadily away from the imagery and techniques that first brought him to attention and developing a new dialogue with his work that is no less preoccupied with subcultures and hidden histories, but is now marked by fascinating nonrepresentational flights of color, gesture and form. In his acclaimed 2010 ‘Cimitero Drawings’ exhibition Treleaven brought dynamic expressionist elaborations to his collaged photographs of Milan’s Monumental Cemetery. In this new series of drawings, Treleaven buries his trademark collages, blacking them out with heavy applications of paint and pastel, so only the faintest outline of the photographic image remains. These imposing, almost brutalist structures give way swaths of electric color and line, to a pictorial space that feels guttural, immediate, and yet strangely sophisticated. Taking his inspiration from psychological and sociological dynamics, Treleaven’s drawings are about the stuff of marginality itself—literally, what happens on the very edges or fringes of a structure. The disruption is done symbiotically: the main structures are never totally lost or destroyed, and the viewer is left with a profound sense of the artist’s need to balance his interventions with the overall integrity of the whole.
- * *
Scott Treleaven was born in Canada, in 1972. A program of his films was recently presented at the
Museum of Modern Art in New York, and his collages were included in the popular Mapplethorpe group exhibition, Night Work, at Alison Jacques Gallery, London. Other exhibitions of note include: Male, Maureen Paley, London (2010); Cimitero Drawings, Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles (2010); Silver Make-Up, The Breeder, Athens (2009); Where He Was Going, John Connelley Presents, New York (2008); and the Biennale de Montreal (2007). His work has been featured in Artforum, Frieze, The New York Times, and Interview Magazine, among others. Treleaven lives and works in Toronto, Canada and Paris, France.
