Marc Selwyn Fine Art is pleased to present a series of new drawings by Paris-based, Canadian artist Scott Treleaven.

The drawings are the result of a 3-month period spent exploring the Cimitero Monumentale in Milan.

How to name what is unnamable? How to present a vision of that which is, by its nature, immaterial?

This is the purpose as well as the paradox of these drawings.

Treleaven began by photographing the cemetery statues. Forty-seven of these 35mm photographs were recently been assembled into a book, published by Printed Matter.

Then: A further transmutation. The artist asks the dead to speak. To rise again in brightness. To again breath fire.

Around the fragments, above and against them, explode patches of handmade color, and a fine but frenzied line that knots up and congeals only to then expand into wide circles and jagged stripes and drips.

On one level, these marks of Treleaven’s hand refute those mute markers of death, the fragments of photographed statues: the handmade instead of the mechanical; color instead of grey; motion rather than paralysis; and so on.

The orchestration of such contrasts no doubt accounts for much of these drawings’ power.

Still, it is only the beginning. As in any mystical system—or even faux-mystical system, which questions its own plausibility—there must always be levels of meaning, and orders of initiation. It is no surprise to find, over time, that the Cimitero drawings complicate (on an intellectual level) and simplify (on an spiritual one).

In another time, another place, there would have been names for all this: words as codes and codes that hide stranger and more potent names.1 Treleaven, being tactful, remains silent, like his statues. But in this silence, and right there in the drawings, hide intimations of immortality.

- David Lewis

1 Cf. The Great God Pan; various Sufi mystics; Hercules Powder Company; (a Book of the Dead); “Every man and every woman is a Star;” Performance; “One or Several Wolves” and “The Wolf-Man;” blue hydrangeas; Rabbit’s Moon; eyeball the size of the world, etc.

Scott Treleaven attended York University, Ontario College of Art and Design and University of Toronto. He exhibits internationally and his work has been featured at P.S.1, New York, Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto, The Montreal Biennial, among others. An accomplished filmmaker, his films have been screened at Museum of Modern Art, New York and The Independent Film Channel. He currently lives and works in Paris.