A distillation is not a reduction. When something is refined down from a larger form, what remains is not less than what preceded it but more concentrated, the essential character intensified rather than diminished. Flower of Passion arrived at Gallery NAO in Roppongi in January 2019, and the relationship between its scale and its density was precisely that: a smaller room, a more focused selection of work, and within that focus something that a larger exhibition cannot always achieve.

Gallery NAO sits in Roppongi steps from the National Art Center Tokyo, in a district where the proximity of major institutions, the Mori Art Museum, the Suntory Museum of Art, the National Art Center itself, creates a particular kind of audience, people who move between serious contemporary work as a matter of course and who bring to each encounter the accumulated context of everything they have seen nearby. The gallery is intimate by the standards of the spaces that surround it, and that intimacy suited the work it now contained.

The exhibition brought together paintings and the Flower of Love portrait installation in a configuration suited to the more concentrated space, alongside the first public showing of the Book of Flowers panels. These mixed media works on paper, built on gold grounds with Cooley's numbers moving through their surfaces, represented a genuinely new material direction: pages and plates from a book that had existed first as an object and now appeared on gallery walls, each panel a distinct world held within its own formal boundaries. The blue and gold surfaces and embedded symbolic figures belonged unmistakably to Cooley's visual language while operating in a register the paintings had not previously occupied, the work on paper carrying a different intimacy, a different scale of attention, from anything the practice had produced before. Among the portraits on the walls was that of Erica, the autonomous android developed by Prof. Hiroshi Ishiguro of Osaka University, whose presence in this particular district of this particular city felt entirely at home.

Monthly Bijutsu, one of Japan's most respected art publications, featured the exhibition in its most anticipated artists of 2019, describing Cooley's work as driven by instinct and overflowing with love and passion. It was a characterisation that the works in the room had already made without words, and that the publication had simply found the language to confirm.