BLOCKPROJECTS 13/11/25 BLOCKPROJECTS 13/11/25

MERRIC BRETTLE: PSYCHOPOMP 2:POETRY OF THE MECHANICS

MERRIC BRETTLE

26.11.25 - 20.12.25

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Installation images

Psychopomp 2 - The Poetry of Mechanics.

At the heart of my practice is an exploration of what it means to be an individual within our contemporary socio-cultural condition. With this in mind, I make two types of work. The first investigates what this condition ‘is’, and the second expresses my reflections on what it means to ‘be’ within it.

The first type of work therefore, investigates the social world we share, as I collect and remake bits of it that convey some ‘sense’ of it to me. These ‘bits’ are all images from the Internet, and the works I make from them are my Pattern Finding pieces. In these works I reverse engineer these sense/samples and explore how they ‘work’ on me.

It is by capturing the look of screen backlighting, for instance, that I come to understand our experiential relationship to a mechanised culture, and by making abstract pieces using colour pallets from advertising material, that I get an idea of a socio-cultural mood.

In these works, ‘I’ exist in their translation from sample image to object, and the ‘marks’ of my presence relate to ‘impression’ as opposed to ‘expression’.

While constructing these works is an ongoing process, there is another type that I make paral-lel to them. These are my Reflection pieces, and they express ‘what’ I considered this condition to be, ‘the way’ that I saw it, and ‘how’ I understood being within it at different times. In them I employ an expanding number of systems of being creative, in series, to explore my ideas.

In some of these system/series, for example, I add to pattern finding pieces and overlay them with other materials to express the personal relationship I had with them when I ‘found’ them. In others I join two or more samples to explore a resonance that express’ something else. In yet others I explore the materials, methods and images I found in my pattern finding works, as a kind of language through which to express my ideas. These systems/series are represented in the Liminal Object, Ritual Process and Sense Data works shown here.

In these works ‘I’ exist in them as samples, yet also in the choices that my system/series afford. Consequently, within them, the ‘mark’ of my presence is multiple, exists in layers, and expresses both impression and expression.

Contemplating the works in this exhibition, they are all ‘visual poems’ and as such they are all emotional and experiential responses to ‘being in the world’. In saying this however, their poetry probably lies just as much in the mechanics of the systems I use as in the surface image I construct.

With this in mind, I hope that the viewer reads the works formally as they would allow for the poetry in these mechanics to be seen. Consequently, I would like them to consider the works as experiential metaphors of they way that I as one individual came to terms with our strange new digitized and globalised condition.

It is as an experiential metaphor thus, that I hope for them to explore the systems I employ to make work, as they reflect those that we all use to understand reality itself. That they consider the levels of choice that these systems generate in the works, as they create a ‘space’ between the viewer and object for them to explore. And that they understand the ‘senses’ that they receive from the work themselves, as they are a product of not just my agency, but also of the worlds on me.

Seen in this way the poetry of this ‘rude mechanical’ lies in understanding my works as personal ‘flights of being’. The mechanics of my poetry understood as the systems I devise to explore the possibilities of my own creativity. And the beauty of these mechanics, as to me, these poetics of creativity, express the limits and possibilities of ‘being’ itself.

Merric Brettle, 2025

ARTWORKS:

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BLOCKPROJECTS 2/10/25 BLOCKPROJECTS 2/10/25

david freney-mills: continuum

DAVID FRENEY-MILLS

01.10.25 - 25.10.25

Installation images

Continuum

David Freney-Mills approaches abstraction as something alive, shifting and adapting like an organism. His paintings hold the traces of thought, cuts, layers, and gestures that build into constellations of presence. Language becomes his subject, not written or spoken, but sensed as an evolving system of signs, shapes, and rhythms.

In his first solo exhibition at Blockprojects, titled Continuum, Freney-Mills presents painting as a dynamic encounter rather than a static object. Central to the exhibition is the Hyperglyph series. These artworks start with ink applied to Korean hanji paper, which is then hand-painted, torn, and rearranged before being mounted on canvas. They convey a sense of movement and transformation. The overlapping and dissolving fragments resemble glyphs from a lost script, creating an atmospheric presence that evokes memory and the continuity of thought across time.

Freney-Mills moves easily between traditions. His work embodies the discipline of reductive abstraction while also drawing inspiration from East Asian aesthetics, including ink painting, calligraphy, textile dyeing, and woodblock printing. This dialogue produces paintings that are direct, sensorial, and quietly transformative.

The works carry the resonance of history while speaking in a voice that feels entirely of the present. They invite an experience that is both immediate and enduring, a language of presence and transformation that unfolds differently for each viewer.

ARTWORKS:

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BLOCKPROJECTS 6/9/25 BLOCKPROJECTS 6/9/25

jarryd Cooper: juggernaut

Jarryd Cooper

03.09.25 - 27.09.25

Artworks

Jagganath

Philip Guston put down his brush and crushed his cigarette out in his palette. Ash pink dawn was breaking, and the cold light crept into his studio and cast an illuminating ray over his efforts, confirming what he had started to suspect. Completion.

What was it he saw there, in the countless strokes and scrapings? Some great steamroller. A chariot of dread proportion ploughing its way through all before it. From beneath the weight of the heavy roller, prickly legs issue forth in agony, crushed crimson and bulbous. Their shoes, horse shod, turned upwards to a bloodshot sun. He had always preferred Newton to Einstein. The gravity of it all!

He had been at it all night. He ate spaghetti and meatballs with Musa then made the short walk to the studio. When he squeezed out his first pustules of cadmium red, everybody was there. Friends, family, peers, critics. The whole bloody pantheon. But as he pondered and paced, and prodded and prised, one by one they all started to leave. Just like he always said they would. Was he going to leave too?

He took out his iphone and opened the camera. The clack of the shutter. A pale facsimile. Crooked and bowed, a deformed likeness if any. His thick and clumsy digits, so deft with the brush, plodded and fumbled numbly across the sleek paint smeared device, and eventually stumbled into Instagram.

He had never even wanted it. Bill de Kooning had persuaded him to get it. He had been late to Facebook too but had gradually succumbed. His last post read something along the lines of… “I do not give Facebook or any entities associated with Facebook permission to use my pictures.”

All his poet friends were on twitter, and he secretly wished he could join them. But Bill could be so persuasive. It’s freedom Phil! And that’s your true subject!

Ah well. Give it a go! What’s the worst that could happen?

The sun is starting to rise up over the trees. Crows perch on power lines and a cat knocks over a dustbin. But Philip can only stare in anxious wait at the greasy portend. Nothing. Why is it taking so long? Idiot. You fool, you should never have been so stupid. How could you let Bill talk you into this? To think that anyone could possibly appreciate what you’re doing. And what’s happened to you? In what sad pathetic world would anyone with a shred of integrity resort to… wait. A flash. A buzz. Like flies waking, and picking up their first scent, steadily they start to swarm. The dam busts open, and the deluge of approval washes in like a flood. He can’t fathom it. The adulation, the glory, all there in his paw.

No jibes and snide remarks. No accusations or mention of mandarins and stumblebums. Just positivity. Yes. Just nice words of affirmation. They like it. They actually like it. I’ve made something that people like. Fuck!

Thumbs up. OMG love this! The Pink is on point!

What do they mean by that, on point?

Now what, they’re making comparisons? Oh Jesus!

Love the Krazy Kat vibes. You should check out George Herriman. Hey @robertcrumbofficial get a load of this! Fuck yeah dude channelling some hungover De Chirico energy.

Oh, God stop! Stop! He tries to write back to these people. Tell them they’re wrong. Tell them the painting is a failure. An utter failure. But Bill didn’t teach him how to respond. Didn’t show him where it’s @

So, he shouts into the void. Can’t you all see this fraudulence? Can you not see you’ve been hoodwinked?

What have I done? They had all gone. They had finally left me alone, and then fool that I am, frail creature of vanity, I invited them all back in. I opened the box. I threw myself under the rampaging wheels of Jagganath. I am solely to blame. This and many more desperate utterances are spat into the chasm, unaware that with indifference, the algorithm had ploughed on, swallowing his words like a street sweeper, churning them up, perhaps to one day cast them adrift, to wash up on a desolate foreign shore.

Haggard and bereft, his day ruined, he lights a cigarette and takes a deep contemplative drag. Nothing to do now but paint. He takes his titanium white and empties it onto his palette. With his biggest brush, he begins to erase and undo. But he struggles against the weight of that mighty chariot. All that red and black, still wet, still living. History is written by victors and Guston wasn’t winning. But gradually things settle, and he relaxes into the process. Slowly though, he starts to sense something. A sound. What is that? Some kind of tone. Tinnitus? No, far worse. A high pitch note, constant, without break. It’s near. It’s inside the building. He steps out of his studio into the hallway, and follows the sound to a room he never even knew was there. No Entry. DANGER. Cellular site. TELSTRA. What is Telstra doing in Upstate New York? Subsidising his studio? Paying his rent? Funding his entire existence? Have they been listening this whole time? Would you believe it? The door isn’t locked.

Inside, everyone is there. Bill, Morty, even Jackson. John is performing four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence. In this version, two split systems rage against the heat of a giant computer running hot, and that same ear-piercing tone, strikes its blistering knell. Lights flash green, but one is red, bloodshot even, and it doesn’t flash. It sits static, radiating like it were painted. It hums along to the silence. A socket beneath it plays host to a snaking cord. He’s down to one line now. With Mickey Mouse gloves, he grips it. The line goes taut and Guston, sweating under his hood, tastes salt on his lips. Well, he says to himself. What’s the worst that could happen?

Written by Harry Hay.

Hay is a painter and writer based in Melbourne.

ARTWORKS:

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BLOCKPROJECTS 17/6/22 BLOCKPROJECTS 17/6/22

jarryd cooper: An Open Door, An Unsightly Nexus.

Jarryd Cooper

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

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