James Roper

Ciberium emesis, 2009

Exactly four minutes and six seconds into Deerhunter's "Nothing Ever Happened", boiling point is achieved, hurtling a glassy cyclone of kraut, barbed wire, and Marfan syndrome past a quickly foaming horizon.

That singular moment of hyper-reality, where tectonic plates melt and colours sing in every language never made is tricky enough to score; fucking batshit to paint. 

Then I discovered James Roper.

Roper's artwork is a screaming fist of temperatures and movement. A black hole skinned alive and pinned down with exclamation points. Fabric, organs, light, all fold and pleat and ejaculate from (and towards, occasionally through) a seething mass of heightened excitement.

His paintings address a fascination with the ceiling of perception and the forms that best suggest it—and then tearing a lighter against its oil-slick surface(s).

Autosarcography, 2009

Roper's earliest forays into what he calls a cognitive "peak-shift" began with the spiraling contrails of energy/magic/whatever found in most all anime and manga. From his Collapse Inversion series, it isn't hard to picture a power-mad Tetsuo, blasting new physics from an ever-expanding bubble of destruction.

Collapse Inversion 3, 2007

Collapse Inversion 1, 2007