Adrian Cox’s Borderlands paintings, to be unveiled in an upcoming show at Corey Helford Gallery in Los Angeles, are set in an Edenic vision of managed woodlands and weeded meadows, where fine and formal trees cast gentle shadows onto soft, green-carpeted forest floors. But this pleasant, lovely land of rolling rivers hosts a pink population of strange organisms—humanoid and faceless figures that have ascended from fungal forms, bright hominids evolved from the liminal slime on the mold-slipped edges of watery and fecund places. These are the border creatures, the spiritual and physical extensions of the idyllic landscape. They are the faceless caretakers of the Borderlands. “These strange but peaceful creatures are artists, gardeners, poets, scientists and mystics,” Cox says, “When they dream, the landscape dreams with them.” They coexist with the land and live in peaceful anarchy.
Adrian Cox in his studioBut Cox’s creatures of the Borderlands come in two species. The home of the border creatures has been invaded by blue, glowing specters, evil trespassers who have come to cause harm to the benign land of the fungal creatures. The specters are destructive and exploitative. They are an entirely anonymous collective, led by a king who may be any one of them, only differentiated from the other specters by zipping on a coverall skin suit which gives the creature authority. In The Spectral King Enthroned the suit has symbols etched into it like tattoos. A simple crown is outlined on his forehead, a rude skull and a dagger line his shoulders, and an all-seeing eye on each knee, both accompanied by a downward pointing arrow. His authority is primitive and prescriptive. His staff burns and he rules with fire.
Big Dreamer with an Ode to the Sea, 2023, oil on panel, 24 x 20”The paintings illustrate moments drawn from Cox’s wild imagination, and the pictures he paints are fragments of a growing narrative that exists in his head. “Each image that I create is an exploratory step leading deeper into a territory that exists at the threshold of the real and the imagined, the physical world and the world of dreams,” explains Cox. “Although this imaginal space has its origins inside of me, it’s something that I’ve created to have a life of its own. I invite viewers of my work to inhabit this landscape like a shared dream. Entering this space is a creative act, because, as with dreams, the symbols and stories that you will encounter there aren’t limited to fixed singular meanings. Each scene that I paint is a fragment of an ever-expanding myth. But paintings can’t speak and the narrative that you piece together from these scraps of story is uniquely your own.” He is keenly aware of the difference between experiencing a painting and understanding it, and perfectly happy for viewers to create their own narratives based on their interpretation of them. The paintings are doorways to the viewer’s creativity.
Snake Gardener with Spring Studies, 2022, oil on panel, 24 x 20”
The building narrative which guides our imaginative exploration of Cox’s mythic mind is not a simplistic story of good and bad. Some of the blue specters have been confronted with the revelation of their evil nature and have metamorphosed into rainbow specters who are hungry for redemption, and exhibit signs of individuality as their colors shift across the spectrum. The border creatures attempt dialogue with these strange creatures, which are halfway between good and evil.
Painter with Winter Journey, 2022, oil on panel, 16 x 20”
The Lost Spectral Witnesses XX (Island), 2022, oil on panel, 36 x 48"
Spirit Gardener Calling the Lost Spectral Witnesses, 2022, oil on panel, 36 x 48"
As the border creatures have evolved, they have learned the arts. Big Dreamer with an Ode to the Sea is a portrait of one who has turned to poetry to make sense of the world. His outer body is taking the form of flowers, which glisten with the shining reflective surfaces of slick water-borne cells. He has adopted the tied tunic of classical man to cover his weird vegetable nudity and raises a white seashell for our contemplation in a manicured human hand. A beautiful black and white bird listens attentively to his verse, which he reads from a well-bound book. The sunset lights his idyll in golden light. The eponymous figure in Painter’s Tower has learned to compose an abstract painting. Set up in an outdoor studio, a nude mushroom-bodied model reclines beside a painting-within-a-painting that depicts a pair of border creatures embracing in the mist and moss of a fantastic treescape backlit by the glow of a primordial star.
The Spectral King Enthroned, 2023, oil on panel, 40 x 30”
But the malevolent blue specters are coming in a small flotilla, flying the pirate flag of their king, decorated with a skull and an outlined arm bearing a burning staff. A cloth covering Painter’s table is decorated with another painting-within-a-painting, this one of the aftermath of a previous attack by his spectral enemies, who overturned his easel and threw his abstract canvases to the snow-covered ground. In this image, despairing Painter cups his head in his hands and walks away from the scene, taking his light with him.
The Lost Spectral Witnesses XIX (Initiation), 2022, oil on panel, 36”
Increasing our sense of the uncanny, Cox plays with placing the weird bodies of his benign beings in positions of archetypal familiarity, using the long-established emblems of the Marseille tarot deck to shape his compositions. The Emperor King. The Lovers. In Painter’s Tower, the character is in the stance of the Marseilles Magician. In Painter with Winter Journey, he is in the guise of the tarot’s Hermit, raising a lamp to lighten the darkness he explores. Cox explains, “I’ve always been interested in playing with these archetypal symbols, and when I started reading Meditations on the Tarot and looking through the Marseilles tarot specifically, there was something really irreducible about these archetypes. You can’t say, ‘this symbol is a sign.’ It always stays just out of reach, and that’s highly compelling to me. I’m trying to draw on that to connect to the content that’s already in my work, to lend it depth that operates on a level that’s not overtly discursive or conceptual—it’s more intuitive than that. I’m using the figurative elements to order the narrative structure of the cycle.”
Signal Fires, 2023, oil on panel, 18”
Like the enigmatic emblems of the tarot, these narrative paintings require interpretation. However, anyone will find satisfaction in Cox’s strange imagination, for the border creatures are beautiful, delightful abominations—though they have adapted the proportions and flawless hands of man. With their actions they imitate human consciousness, their pink and alien presence is wrapped within faceless, fungoid forms. Cox’s Borderlands lie somewhere in the mysterious depths of the uncanny valley, where mannequin-things that closely resemble human bodies and behavior simultaneously repulse us and attract us, making us feel the sublime and uncomfortable pleasure inspired by the extraordinary, the outlandish and the unfamiliar. Cox is on a wonderfully weird journey into the realms of his imagination and we are welcomed to it.
Painter’s Tower, 2022, oil on panel, 48 x 36”
An opening reception for his solo exhibition The Brush and the Torch will be held June 3 from 7 p.m. to 11 p.m. at Corey Helford Gallery in Los Angeles.
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Michael Pearce is a dynamic writer, curator and critic. He has published dozens of articles about art and artists, and is author of Kitsch, Propaganda, and the American Avant-Garde. He is a champion of art that emerges from popular culture and shapes the spirit of the age. He is Professor of Art at California Lutheran University. —
The Brush and the Torch
June 3-July 8
Corey Helford Gallery
571 S. Anderson Street, Los Angeles, CA 90033
(310) 287-2340, www.coreyhelford.com
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