Nigel Cooke: Andrea Rosen Gallery.
Turvey, Lisa
Nigel Cooke holds a doctorate in Fine Art from Goldsmiths, London,
where he wrote a thesis on the death of painting in the twentieth
century. To begin by mentioning this fact might seem to be stacking the
deck if a concern with the medium's various historical demises did
not figure so markedly in the British artist's work--but it does,
to the extent that he titled his second solo show at Andrea Rosen
Gallery "Dead Painter." The phrase encompasses art-historical
corpses (skulls and bearded old men populated the six oils and two
drawings on view) as well as Cooke himself, as one who paints
what's died. Indeed, the young English artist is not painting the
end of painting so much as he is painting about the end of painting: His
bile-colored canvases are phantasmagoric graveyards where the
medium's conventions and contraries have come to collide and expire
and, in so doing, sustain his practice.
Cooke has said that his works "pretend at being total
paintings, or painting extreme--overloaded, high octane, all the
painting you'll ever need." The Artist's Garden (all
works 2006) displays such encyclopedic breadth in its welter of formal
and stylistic oppositions. The spatial recession implied by a
kaleidoscopic garden sprawling under a peaked-roof aerie is set against
a gold backdrop, the monochromatic expanse of which, together with
intermittent graffiti elsewhere on the surface, work to assert the
flatness of the picture plane; abstract squiggles commingle with
caricatures of human faces and animals; and color and line are used both
as independent properties and as means of bounding form and object. In
addition, the grand scale of the work (it's over twelve feet wide)
contends with the microscopic detail of its contents, and the
lacquerlike polish achieved by repeated coats of paint is regularly
punctured by small pockmarks resembling spots of rust.
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Cooke has raised his horizon line in this batch of work, ceding
more and more of the stretches of infected sky in his earlier paintings
to loopy, meandering doodles. It's a trading of curdled Romantic
landscapes for even sicker Surrealist mindscapes. There's more to
decipher and less room to breathe, but what materializes in the bargain
is Cooke's keen feel for structure: The edge-to-edge marking in Ill
Health, for example, evokes the dense spatial irresolution of Willem de
Kooning's Excavation, 1950. In two pencil studies, delicate
sublayer traceries and surface figuration seem to repeatedly alternate
places, confirming Cooke's fluency with multiple pictorial strata.
Comparing the study for Night Thoughts with the finished canvas is akin
to looking at an X-ray side by side with the object it pictures. This
painting is the surest on view; its surface seems to pulse between the
gray-on-gray ciphers of the still-life objects (bulbous fruit and a
bottle of wine) that lie beneath and the crosshatching and built-up
patches of paint above. These are huge, packed works that perhaps try to
do too much at once--but such overreaching is endemic to Cooke's
project, and in his prolixity he succeeds in limning several of the
practical and theoretical dynamics that have steered the past of
painting and that will, for better or worse, shape its future.
