BRIAN COOPER: Things Thinking
3209 W Washington Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90018
Cooper's work generally focuses on the relationship between consciousness and the material world. He has always been fascinated with the ethereal effects of highly illusionistic painting like his favorites, the Flemish Primitives, and strangeness of Surrealism, the Chicago Imagists, West Coast psychedelia, and underground comics. These interests form an oscillating rhythm between a quiet place of "grace" and a louder frenzy of humor and imagination.
In the show, Cooper creates an oppositional layout of 13 red oil paintings of various sizes hung in salon style on one wall with a 12' wide dark blue painting of a famous early modular synthesizer on the other. The exhibition also includes a small stage in front of the blue synthesizer painting with 2 upholstered benches on the gallery floor whose forms are similar to the red paintings. Several music events in the gallery are scheduled throughout the length of the show. The exhibition continues his interest in the relationship of mind and body while also suggesting themes of human and machine, part versus whole, and art and music,
The red paintings can be described as highly illusionistic images of curvy abstracted forms with colors similar to varied skin tones. They twist and bend in a way that is part orgy and part wrestling match. They lick and caress as they push and tug. Boxed in by the edges of the canvas, they are pushed into a pluralistic collective whole. Their abstraction makes the body seem far stranger and more uncanny than one would normally admit.
The blue synthesizer painting is called"Perceptions Delusion (Whoever Felt It Dealt It)". It is an allegorical painting about researcher Donald Hoffman's ideas about our relationship with reality. Perception is a kind of interface with the world using a variety of metaphoric switches and dials to detect what is going on around us. These dials and switches create a sort of "mental map" of what our senses detect. So in other words, we don't see reality as it truly is. What we see instead is just a mental model of reality. According to Hoffman, this way of observing the world helps us survive and prosper yet it does not give us a clear glimpse into the true nature of reality. They are only maps. He suggests we are mistaking our maps for reality.
Brian Cooper's work has been seen in Le Monde, Juxtapoz, Hi Fructose, Booooooom, Artillery, L.A. Weekly, Art and Cake, Beautiful Decay, New American Paintings, and the Arizona Republic as well as many other periodicals. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at several galleries and museums like White Columns, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, and Greenpoint Terminal Gallery in New York City, several shows in Los Angeles at galleries like Acuna Hansen, Odd Ark, and Big Pictures LA, plus exhibitions in Berlin, Japan, The Netherlands, Mexico, and Colombia.Cooper received a B.F.A. from The San Francisco Art Institute and an M.F.A. from The University of Southern California. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles.