James Roper

Inspired by the Baroque masters, Roper’s acrylic-on-canvas paintings depict hallucinatory and ambiguous images that address notions of the sublime. Amid images of billowing cloud formations and voluminous folds of fabric, the artist finds contemporary correlations across multiple disciplines, from neuroscience and quantum physics, to Hollywood blockbusters and haute couture, to Japanese Anime and street art. In all of his work, eye-popping color and crisp pattern reference an otherworldliness and possibly an alternative existence, and any pictorial “reality,” whether heightened or abstracted, is as much a figment of neurological processes as aesthetic phenomena.