On Saturday, June 3rd, downtown Los Angeles’ Corey Helford Gallery (CHG) will proudly unveil a new solo show from figurative painter Adrian Cox, titled The Brush and the Torch, in the Main Gallery.

The studio practice for the Los Angeles-based artist and compelling storyteller involves crafting an intricate and epic mythology with his paintings, in which he explores questions of identity, spirituality, and our relationship with the natural world. In creating his work, Cox draws inspiration from art history, science fiction, mythic archetypes, and his own experience of growing up in a closeted queer family. Featuring twenty-five new works, The Brush and the Torch marks Cox’s largest solo exhibition to date and fourth at CHG, following Dream Country (Sept. 2021), Into the Spirit Garden (Mar. 2020), and Terra Incognita (Feb. 2018).

My paintings are connected by a mythic narrative, set in a world that I call the Borderlands. For over a decade, I've cultivated this internal landscape and used my paintings to give it form. Each image 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. Although the origins of this imaginal space come from inside 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.

This exhibition can be viewed without any further context; however, it can also be positioned within the mythology that I've crafted over the course of my career. As a narrative painter, I've always been acutely aware of this tension between knowing a work of art and experiencing it. Although I don't see these two paths as mutually exclusive, I recognize that context alters how we experience stories and I've created these paintings with both approaches in mind. Those of you that wish to approach the story of The Brush and the Torch as a singular, dream-like experience may want to stop reading here. However, if you're curious to know more about the lore behind my work, I'd like to share some of the backstory of the Borderlands and those that live there.

The protagonists of the mythology that I've created are beings known as Border Creatures. These creatures are both physically and spiritually an extension of the landscape that they inhabit. Their anatomy combines human traits with those of the Borderlands and they serve as caretakers of their wilderness home. These strange but peaceful creatures are artists, gardeners, poets, scientists, and mystics. When they dream, the landscape dreams with them. The Border Creatures are antagonized by the Specters, blue spirits of pure energy that are led by the Spectral King. These spirits casually burn the landscape that they walk upon and are alienated from the world that they inhabit. The Specters perceive that which is other as a threat or as a resource reducible to its usefulness. The war between the Border Creatures and Specters is a conflict between two distinct ways of being in the world.

From this struggle, a third group known as the Spectral Witnesses were brought forth into the Borderlands. These rainbow-hued spirits were once Specters, but they were transformed when they bore witness to a mystical revelation. This revelation was a spiritual awakening for them but it also destroyed the worldview that had given them purpose and identity as Specters. These rainbow Witnesses now wander the Borderlands, seeking a path to redemption.

The Brush and the Torch is an exploration of the nature and source of creativity. The story that unfolds in this exhibition suggests the importance of cultivating internal imaginal landscapes and depicts spiritual development as an engagement with the world rather than a departure from it. Ultimately, however, I created these paintings to be symbols for something beyond the reach of discursive thought. The Borderlands exist outside of me and my intentions as an artist, so I invite you to find personal meaning in this mythic world.

(Adrian Cox)

Adrian Cox (born 1988) is a painter living and working in Los Angeles, California. Cox’s studio practice involves crafting an intricate and epic mythology with his paintings, in which he explores questions of identity, spirituality, and our relationship with the natural world. In creating his work, Cox draws inspiration from art history, science fiction, mythic archetypes, and his own experience of growing up in a closeted queer family. Cox attended the University of Georgia for his undergraduate studies and received his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree with honors in 2010. He obtained his Master of Fine Arts degree from Washington University in Saint Louis in 2012. Cox has exhibited his work nationally and abroad, plus his paintings have been featured by VICE, Juxtapoz, Beautiful Bizarre, Hi-Fructose, Heavy Metal Magazine, PROHBTD, and in the book Anatomy Rocks: Flesh and Bones in Contemporary Art.

Last summer, Cox’s work was on display in A Kind of Heaven (May 2022) hosted at Oceanside Museum of Art in Oceanside, CA. The group exhibition featured recent paintings by Southern Californian visionary artists who imagine the world as another place, where alternatives to everyday reality are made manifest, and landscapes, animals, and people are transformed.

This June, Cox will premiere his fourth solo show at Los Angeles’ Corey Helford Gallery (CHG), titled The Brush and the Torch, following Dream Country (Sept. 2021), Into the Spirit Garden (Mar. 2020), and Terra Incognita (Feb. 2018). Into the Spirit Garden garnered the attention of internationally acclaimed rock band Tool, who used Cox’s piece "The Birth of Spirit Gardener” from the show for a limited-edition concert poster.