Jared Deery seems to revel in trespassing art-school rules, by breaking forms, flattening space with unorthodox scale changes, and perhaps most interestingly, juxtaposing clashing colors and contrasting textures. But his shenanigans add up to smart paintings that work formally and conceptually intrigue, as compositions coalesce with integrated designs and nuanced color shifts, and irregularities transform into personal histories and courageous artistic experimentation. Also unexpected and contradictory are the motifs themselves. Except for one painting of a head – perhaps the visionary conductor of this painterly spectacle – the mostly large paintings revolve around flowers in vases, a motif Jared has focused on for years. But these are not actual flower paintings. They are not even still lifes or landscapes, though the flowers sit in some kind of place. Rather, these flowers appear as flowers of the mind – some real, some imagined – and perhaps represent the artist himself, or a voyeur or messenger of memory and thought. We often look through windows, or rather the flowers look through windows, to collaged worlds that suggest the congruence of recollection and imagination, a Synthetic-Cubist coexistence of past, present and future, of up, down, near and far interchanged at will, mimicking the illogical connections and metaphors that often occur in our unconscious. For instance, in “Memory of a Tabletop,” we see a childhood beach picnic table depicted by faux wood paint marks, the beach represented by shells implanted on a vase, the sea, sand and sun contained in a hat-like shape floating above, and the intangibility of memory by a vase made almost invisible as its thick outline and color shifts are all that remain to show its ghost still exists. Jared seems to be having fun exploring where and with what new painterly techniques he can embed his imagery to create surprise and ambiguity, make us suspend belief in the permanent and rational, wonder at what is going on, accept that all is a transitory illusion, and realize that what we perceive as reality perhaps is no more real than Deery’s fantastical paintings. Jared’s exhibition at Freight + Volume Gallery remains up through Feb. 24.