Into the BORDERLANDS

Painter Adrian Cox takes you on a visual journey into a fully-developed mythical realm between the real and imagined

- MICHAEL PEARCE

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.

But 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.