Cooper Cole is pleased to present Hello Faun, a two-person exhibition by New York-based artist Elisabeth Kley and Toronto-based artist, Scott Treleaven.

Hello Faun bridges Kley and Treleaven’s shared fascination for epochs and historical communities that have regarded beauty and decoration as vital components of human flourishing and social reform. The exhibition features five of Kley’s signature black and white ceramic vessels, for her first presentation in Canada, alongside a new body of works on paper by Treleaven, created in tandem with his ongoing ‘new pagan paintings’ series that premiered at the gallery in 2023.

In 1969, writer and illustrator Philippe Jullian published Esthètes et Magiciens, a crucial reexamination of the Decadents and Symbolists, written some sixty years after the peak creative fervour of the fin de siècle. Widely celebrated, Jullian’s book imagined the burgeoning youth culture of his own era could learn from an aesthetic movement that didn’t regard utopian fantasies as distractions from activism, but rather as an essential precursor. What Jullian effectively described was part of a recurring, tenuous aesthetic alliance that can be traced back to late antiquity; a sensibility that can be found in abundance throughout Kley’s and Treleaven’s work.