In new works on view at High Art in Paris, the London-based artist riffs on the cycle of birth and death, offering a darkly funny commentary on our naive pursuit of purpose

Matt Copson deploys light and lasers to illuminate the futility of human ambition

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A man condemned to death by hanging is led to the gallows on a Monday. Noose around his neck, hands tied, he looks to the assembled crowd and declares: ‘What a way to start the week!’ In and of itself, death is not funny. The events of the past year have proven this with little subtlety. But, arguably, death is also the apogee of comedic subjects – the one thing that cannot be bested. To laugh at death is to laugh at one’s insufficiency, which is to say, one’s mortality.As André Breton wrote in 1939, black humor is ‘the mortal enemy of sentimentality.’ In&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/25710/Matt-Copson" target="_blank">Matt Copson</a>’s work, sentimentality is fighting a losing battle. Through a series of hand-drawn and, most recently, computer-generated laser projections, Copson flippantly riffs on the futility of human ambition, the fated struggle for self-definition, the naive pursuit of purpose. In the same sharp-tongued soliloquies, he will deride our human desire for posterity and our adoration of entertainment, our determination for self-betterment, and our penchant for self-destruction. But these are far more than the typical memento mori. As demonstrated by his latest show, ‘Coming of Age’, currently on view at <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/2244/High-Art">High Art</a> in Paris, Copson’s is an art unafraid to quite literally illuminate, even celebrate, the many irresolvable contradictions that make us who we are.

Copson, 28, was born in Oxford and works from a London studio. Perhaps ironic for a city-dweller, Copson’s narratives are often voiced by a distinctive, deranged (or, distinctively deranged) cast of animals: They are born, tolerate life, die; they float across walls and jettison their rage and self-loathing upon anyone unfortunate enough to have wandered within earshot. In Transcend and Die (2018), a headless fox circles a woodpecker as it ruminates on the value of beauty, posterity, and the banality of life: ‘Sometimes I feel like making the world a better place / but then I get bored.’ In Blorange (2018), three laser-projected birds find themselves caught up in a cycle – both literally, as each is programmed in a closed sequence, and existentially. ‘I’m gonna live forever,’ says the central bird, mulling on the tedium of immortality. ‘I’m gonna live forever in eternal irrelevancy.’

Copson’s most loyal companion is a fox. Loosely based on Reynard the Fox, a character from Lorraine folk tradition, he is frequently summoned to spit bile at society’s many ills. In the animated mural Reynard with a Vengeance (2013), first shown at London’s ICA in 2014, he snarls through a pseudo-fascistic manifesto against everything and everyone, from aristocrats to firemen, while in Sob Story (2016), the centerpiece of Copson’s inaugural exhibition at High Art, his head rotates on a spit as he reflects on rebirth – and the possibilities therein. (‘Immortality puts a real spin on things,’ he quips to an audience of none.) In the laser diptych Down Boy (2019), which lit up Copson’s 2019 show at <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1255/Reena-Spaulings-Fine-Art">Reena Spaulings</a>, New York, Reynard turns his attention to his own reflection. ‘My integrity was compromised at birth,’ he growls, ‘but if the first act is tragic, then the audience knows they’re in store for redemption.’ Alas, this is no redemption tale. At the close, he morphs into a bone and consumes himself.

Copson’s therianthropic narratives are indebted to beast epics: literary forms in which anthropomorphic creatures are employed as a means to discuss subjects considered taboo, overly salacious, or simply too ‘real’ for contemporaneous audiences to contemplate – namely, death, itself a constant presence in Copson’s work. Nowhere is mortality more menacingly present than in Death, Again (2019), a laser-projected memento mori in which a stream of mayflies flees the mouth of a gyrating skull, only to die once more. (Death begets death, always.) But if these works teach anything, it is that the dead are born again, and for his current exhibition at High Art, Copson presents a triptych of laser projections following the development of a newborn baby:&nbsp;Age of Coming, Coming of Age and Of Coming Age.&nbsp;An opera (with music by Caroline Polachek) in three laser-projected parts, the trio tells&nbsp;a tale of innocence and experience where neither option is preferable, a twisted coming-of-age saga in which our youthful protagonist learns essential truths about our nihilistic world. The baby poses for a life-drawing class, interacts with its doppelgänger, becomes pregnant and births itself. Cast in brilliant light, this young protagonist is both creation and destruction at once, birth and death in the same infantile form.

In 1939, W.H. Auden wrote: ‘We must love one another or die.’ In 1955, he revised his lament: ‘We must love one another and die.’ Copson’s work speaks to this vital process of ontological awakening, or the pursuit thereof. For these kinetic murals, joyfully light as their aesthetic and irony might be, are framed by a palpable apprehension as to the futility of being and the meaninglessness of the things that we think of as meaningful. (A fragment from Transcend and Die runs close to Auden’s amended elegy – ‘to love and be loved / to transcend and die.’) While such metaphysical wrangling could seem morbid – especially against a backdrop such as the ongoing pandemic – Copson’s anti-fables frame the achievement of existential self-awareness as an escape of sorts: a liberation from a life of self-deception. As Copson tells me, ‘The only freedom that can be found is within a struggle, always.’ Wary that melancholy has entered the room, he clarifies: ‘But that’s not the worst thing in the world. It means that triumph can happen.'Top image: Matt Copson. See Copson’s ‘Coming of Age’, on view at High Art, Paris, December 16, 2020, through February 13, 2021.&nbsp;Harry Thorne is a writer and editor based in London. His writing has appeared in art-agenda, Apollo, Artforum, Art Monthly and frieze, amongst others. He is a contributing editor of The White Review.

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In new works on view at High Art in Paris, the London-based artist riffs on the cycle of birth and death, offering a darkly funny commentary on our naive pursuit of purpose