Some of the best feelings are damn-near impossible to put into words. Even trained wordsmiths and masters of prose have admitted their own failure to capture the truest forms of our most deeply-held emotions, like love, despair, and joy, because if they're named, they lose some of the individuality we bestow upon them. Rhys Coren describes the work he most enjoys and the work he aims to create as communicating a "fuzzy sense of familiarity," regardless of how unnamable that familiarity may be. In a way, I think that's as close as we can get, but with a wide array of colors, textures, mediums, shapes, and sizes, Coren gets closer than many. His work can feel both brooding and playful, often creating unique symbols that show up continuously, weaving together his own visual language that greets viewers with that same fuzzy embrace. 

Your work contains a lot of symbols, or at least they look like symbols, do they represent things like a word does, or are they more loosely associated?
In the most reductive sense, the reason I make and hope to show my work is to communicate and connect with others. That sounds quite cheesy, but I’m coming to terms with that. I want to communicate, but I want to do it in a way that is adjacent to written or verbal language. By that I mean I wish to communicate in a way that isn’t quite so linear and singular but allows multiple narratives about multiple things in various states of completeness to coexist. Work I respond to most conjures up a sense of familiarity without me being able to put my finger on what’s familiar, and the way I want to connect with others is through this fuzzy sense of familiarity. It’s visceral. Which is odd, as I am overly cerebral in most other parts of my life.

In my work, I always have a literal starting point, referencing personal memories and historical moments alongside design and music. But, over the last 8 or 9 years, through the reduction and editing of source material in an attempt to refine it into a more basic but still recognizable form, I started to develop my own visual language. By stripping back the more obvious signifiers, I realized the potential for personal or culturally specific material to go through a process that distilled it into something more universal. Instead of pointing at things, I could find a fuzzy essence. As I made more work like this, a feedback loop of all the edited references caused cross-contamination and further evolution, eventually leading to the development of certain motifs and symbols that have their own personal etymology. The meanings shift a little. Or, more accurately, they can have multiple meanings at once. I find the idea of semiotics quite daunting, but I like allegory and metaphor a lot. I find I have to jolt myself back into this world every so often, though, as I don’t want to get too lost in the rabbit hole that my work sets up: Stuff > Work about stuff > Work about work about stuff > Work about work about work about stuff, and so on. This is exactly what my most recent solo show at Grimm’s New York space was about. For that group of paintings, I rewound a few years to a decision I made to take the drawn line out of the work and, simply, put it back in. After years of evolving into a kind of abstraction, it felt necessary to be a bit more literal. The line sets up an immediate and unambiguous connection to cartoon images, with each work being made by collaging stills from a range of different animated works, from avant-garde film from the 30s to 80s TV. Then there are original drawings in there, too. But you never lose that directness of the line.

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What’s the oldest piece of your own artwork that you have? When did you make it?
I have many old hard-drives filled with impressively bad animated work from as far back as 2007. In terms of physical, analogue things, I have a painting from 2014. Or, rather, my girlfriend has that painting, but, in our house, so I sort of have it. It was her favourite work from my interim show during my postgraduate course. It’s called ‘It’s alright, we can still go on’, which are lyrics from a Cymande song, and was inspired by the World Unknown parties thrown by Andy Blake and Joe Hart. Christ, they were wild.

Do you paint to music? What's your favorite album to paint to?
I work to music. To say I ‘paint’ to music might suggest I hold a brush and react in a romantic or lyrical way. I probably do that when drawing, but all my paintings - and I call them paintings because they are wall-based things with paint, even though I don’t technically paint, my works will start as drawings that are scanned, collaged, flattened and vectorized, then cut into board with a laser or a water-jet before being coloured and textured by slowly misting paint over each piece. Then I assemble the pieces and glue them. The actual painting bit is probably the only bit where I can’t listen to music because I have a giant extractor fan on. Walking to and from the studio, drawing, framing and gluing is done to loud, hypnotic, rhythmical music. I go for walks most days, as I find them meditative while listening to DJ mixes by Bahamian Moor, Alexis Le Tan, Fervent Moon, Radio Jiro, Nixxon and John Arthur Zahl. Plus mixes and playlists I make myself. As an ongoing project, I’ve been collecting songs of all genres with the word ‘love’ in the title, intermittently making mixes out of them. Then, if it’s really late and I’m having a beer in the studio, Veronica Vasicka is a good way of seeing out the night.

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What’s your process of naming a piece? Your titles are excellent by the way...
Any idea I have is either drawn or written down first. Most ideas require both a sketch and word or two in order to make sense on a later re-reading, with images annotating words as often as the other way around. While the drawing side of things is more direct in the paintings and animations, the titles provide a perfect place for snippets of the writing. Most of it I’ve authored, but a lot of the writing is appropriated from overheard conversations, misheard disco lyrics and John Cooper Clarke poetry, then chopped up and edited or embellished in a way that’s not so dissimilar to the imagery in my paintings. Most of the time the title relates to the inspiration for that work, but a lot of time they just serve to anchor the work in the real with some of that linear, singular language I spoke about wanting to avoid in the paintings. And it’s often a way to set a tone for a sort of rhythm with phonetics or rhyme. It’s amazing how simultaneously crucial and unimportant a title can be.

The colors in your work have this almost washed-out feeling, when did you start using those types of tones? What’s something that draws you to that?
I love colour and colourful things, but I feel very uncomfortable with really bright colour. So, in order to make colours pop and zing and work together, I spend a lot of time looking at Josef Albers’ Interaction of Color plates. They have a full set in the archives of the Royal Academy of Arts where I did my postgrad. It’s amazing what greyish but lemony yellows can do to dull violets. Or peachy yellows alongside aqua blues. Also, work that’s really bright, or large in scale for that matter, pushes me back. I want closeness and intimacy in my paintings. Saying that, the Peter Halley piece at Dallas airport recently blew my mind. It was enormous and bright. As a side note, I’ve been sat here for a few minutes trying to make a joke about the British and American spellings of colour / color. Like, ‘You and Josef really take the ‘u’ out of color.’ But Josef actually puts the ‘you’ in colour. That’s why I’m a huge Albers fan.

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What’s one piece of visual art that has had a notable effect on you?
What’s interesting about that question is that my initial answer was, “Too many to mention.” But, in the moments since I first read it, it’s niggled away at me, and I’ve convinced myself that there could be a seminal work. Or, rather, a string of successive seminal works for different stages in my life. Tony and Beverly Conrad’s Straight and Narrow film had an enormous effect on me. Mark Leckey’s Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore and Boogie Woogie by Normal McLaren. Several Cyprien Gaillard films have blown me away like no other artwork has. Jeremy Deller’s Acid Brass. I often think about Elizabeth Murray and Mary Heilmann shows in New York and London respectively. The Stuart Davis one at The Whitney is one of my most favorite exhibition experiences ever. Dia: Beacon and Marfa have shaped my thinking a lot. Those places change you. Same with the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. Especially if you are British and you’ve not experienced the rural settings for each of those places before. Then there’s the work of Chris Johanson and Barry McGee, both of whom inspired me during my BFA days to think outside of the British shock-factor box that was going on at that time. Oh, and I mustn’t leave out Peter Davis’ list paintings and early abstracts. Or Group Material. Then there’s Haring, Stella, Tauba-Arp, Lewitt, Judd, Klee, Hilma af Klint, Matta-Clark, the Chicago Imagists and, of course, Memphis and Nathalie du Pasquier have all rewired me over the years.

How do you stay productive? What’s one non-survival related motivator in your life?
Art gives me purpose and meaning and that motivates me. And it’s my job. The more I work, the happier I am. That’s an insanely privileged position to be in, especially where I come from, and I fully respect that luck is a major factor in that. When handed opportunities like this, it’s best to make the most of every minute in the studio in case the proverbial rug gets pulled out anytime soon. And, let’s face it, chances are it will.

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I saw you posted a video of you riding a BMX bike from a while back, is that something you've done for a while? Were you in a scene with other bikers?
From 13 or 14 years old, I was more or less feral, hanging out on the streets or in various skateparks. The things you see and experience in city centers at night are incredible, especially at that age from a safe-ish sideline. I had enormous freedom and was in-part raised by the BMX and skate scene. It offered an alternative to the more typical route for teenagers in my hometown. Where I grew up, in Plymouth, on the South West coast of England, anyone that wasn’t in the navy, fought people at football matches or had a ‘proper job’ were considered anomalies. So all the BMXers, skaters, motocrossers, surfers and moshers hung out together, mostly for protection in numbers. We even had to buddy-up with goths on occasion, sharing the one bar and one nightclub that would allow scruffy dressers in. I was fortunate that a lot of my friends were some of the best BMXers in the country, if not the world, so we got to travel all over the UK and even parts of Europe. I think being a BMXer or skater adapts you to live as an artist quite well, as you learn that your development and enjoyment relies on individual dedication within a community. You also get used to being poor in a trade-off for time. Actually, BMX is what inspired me go to art school in an attempt to keep on BMXing and live somewhere else. I literally chose my BFA in Bristol based on proximity to skateparks. Luckily it was also a great BFA.

I’m too old to do it now, though. My body has given up and, quite frankly, the way modern BMXers speak and dress make me feel really old. I like using full grammar in text messages and I still dress like Lou Rajsich or 90s Ed Templeton. White socks, Dickies, and semicolons.

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Congrats on becoming a father, by the way, has having a kid changed the way you work much?
Thanks!! I’m back full-time in the studio after 6 months of intermittent bits and bobs and mostly animating at home which is awesome. Working from home made me make some quite bleak, silent, black and white animations. I think that’s because I almost completely stopped listening to music and got really into all the Brexit politics we have going on. I figured that only knowing a bit was more torturous than diving in and trying to understand every sneaky move by every slippery politician. I actively wanted to increase knowledge and consciousness. There’s nothing blissful about ignorance when your country is self-destructing. For the first time, I was thinking about a world my child has to grow up in. That led to all sorts of tangents on social and cultural reading, especially social mobility and mental health in working-class communities. By accident, I sort of addressed a minor identity crisis I didn’t even realize I was having, heightened by the introspective awareness a child inspires. I was quite the bleak dinner guest for a while. Luckily, no one invited me to dinner. But, now, more than ever, I realize making pleasurable work about life’s little pleasures is entirely necessary. My work is a place politics can’t touch, fuelled by my defiance and anger. It’s not apolitical because it’s not apathetic, it’s deliberately anti-political. So, no, it hasn’t changed the way I work too much, but my resolve and belief in art have strengthened considerably.