jarryd cooper: An Open Door, An Unsightly Nexus.
15.06.22-09.07.22
Installation images, Jarryd Cooper: An Open Door, An Unsightly Nexus . Blockprojects, 2022. Photography: Simon Strong
I read somewhere that the human brain is incapable of comprehending the negative. Which is to say: I tell you not to think of a banana. You are now thinking of a banana. There is no programming in the software of our logic to safeguard against imagining what we are told not to imagine. Let’s twist this idea. I’ll tell you to think of something, but that something doesn’t exist. What are you thinking of now, when pondering this non-existent thing? An expanse? A never-ending nowhere? A spiral, a collapse, a place where everything is dissolving?
Jarryd Cooper’s paintings don’t exist. Does that make sense? Of course it doesn’t, but it’s not supposed to. An Open Door, An Unsightly Nexus is a challenge to the simultaneous expansiveness and non-reality of painting. Concerned with the idea of the hyperobject – entities that are simultaneously entirely real yet wholly beyond our comprehension – these works jolt and sweep between what is known and what could never be known.
As prefix, hyper refers to something that is more than, something that is over, above, beyond. What exists in the realm denoted by hyper stretches beyond our perception of original meaning. To imagine the hyperobject is to imagine something that doesn’t exist. It is an attempt to grasp that which is too vast, too transient, too mercurial, to the point that conventional definitions and ideas of what the object was in the first place are lost in time and space. In this way, An Open Door, An Unsightly Nexus is self-referential; every painting is a view into the hyperobject of painting itself, the non-existent thing I asked you to imagine.
Here, with each technicolour dreamscape, we find ourselves on the far side of the beyond. Jarryd Cooper presents work that stretches beyond the painting into a realm of non-reality. Each of the canvases, executed in vivid hues with equal parts precision and frenzy, are portals to the infinite. They are worlds within worlds within worlds, constantly circling, dissolving, unraveling. The painting is granted agency, kept alive by the artist’s ability to trust equally in improvisation as in the formality of the line. Each form we see would have us believe that we are perceiving something known to us but, just as quickly, the shape fades, collapsing in on itself and escaping our understanding in a hurry of colour and movement.
A note, pinned to temporary walling, in the artist’s studio posed the following question: what is information and what is noise? Each of these paintings seem to be asking that same question in their own right, repeating it to us again and again as they hurriedly shift between these points on a continuum. Just as with the hyperobject, the answer to the question of these paintings, to the contemporary chaos of sorting noise from information, is apparent while remaining beyond grasp. The purpose of painting then, of these paintings especially, is not to pin down the meaning of one single canvas but to view them in the context of all paintings ever, an obscure measure that expands, on and on and on, into infinity, beyond all comprehension.
Claire Summers
