A dreamland is not an escape from the world. It is another version of it, one where the rules have been suspended and the mind is free to go where it needs to go. Cooley has been building his version of that place for thirty years, and Dreamland was the first time it was assembled in full: approximately 140 works drawn from across three decades of practice, 80 of them new, gathered into a single exhibition that was not quite a retrospective and not quite a survey but something that had its own name and its own logic and could not have been anything else.

The Grand Triskaidekatych, the thirteen-panel work that had anchored ICoN at Gallery Chayamachi eight years earlier, stretched across the upper reaches of the space, its gold and copper and iron leaf surfaces catching the light with the authority of something that had earned its place at the center of things. The Fairy Ring paintings returned, their gold grounds and small joyful figures as luminous as they had been in 2017. Works from the Irish mythological Fairyland series hung alongside boro textile pieces, their patched and stitched surfaces carrying the warmth of materials that had already lived one life before Cooley touched them. Heart paintings occupied one wall. The hinged tin Dream Catcher sculptures opened their compartments to the room. A video compiled from years of documentation of Cooley's work played continuously, the whole of the practice in motion, visible from within the exhibition it had helped to produce.

Dreams do not explain their symbols or justify their juxtapositions, and neither do these works. A giant goldfish floats through a patchwork ground. A gardener stands beside an oversized vase. A sunflower fills a canvas from edge to edge. A triangle hangs in a clouded sky above a column of numbers. Each image is complete in itself and opens, on longer looking, onto something else, the way a door left slightly ajar opens onto a room you were not expecting to find. Cooley has described his practice as the product of two simultaneous worlds: the world of reality he moves through each day, and the complementary world that runs alongside it in his imagination. The works in Dreamland are the bridges between them, and the exhibition was the first time enough of those bridges had been gathered in one place to suggest the full shape of the territory they cross.

The Contemporary Art Gallery within Hankyu Men's Osaka occupied the third floor of a flagship complex whose history as one of Osaka's most significant cultural and commercial institutions stretched back decades. The gallery itself was newly established within that context, bringing a fresh exhibition space to a building whose audiences already understood the relationship between serious art and daily life. The relationship between Cooley and Hankyu had been built show by show across many years, each exhibition extending what the previous had established, and Dreamland was its fullest expression: an exhibition that drew on everything that had come before it and arrived, in that particular room, as something entirely present tense.