Nigel Cooke

Scaled down and approached through a micro lens, these seven drawings-cum-paintings are crowned by four larger scale works. Compositionally reminiscent of their micro-cousins, their vivid hues of red, green, orange and royal blue are enlarged from the exercise book to raw linen. They reverse Cooke’s recent series of somber Midnight paintings (2020)—painted after sunset in melancholy hues of Celestial, Prussian and Denumium blue—they appear hopeful, of another day and time. Moving from the clear figuration of Cooke’s former work to abstract networks of line and color, these paintings show the suggestion of a jawline or the heft and suggestion of a body, blood vessels as tumbleweed, organic, constrained and let-loose transspecies.

Cooke’s lines both reward and thwart the demand for meaning. The experience of seeing is illusory but also personal and flexible, and it suggests the possibility of an image to be seen in many ways by the same person. Here we have both the flurry and decided direct assertion of British painter Francis Bacon, yet we also have the open dimensions of Korean master artist Lee Ufan. As with Lee, Cooke also writes, defining and redefining each consecutive step. If painting is a language in Cooke, we have both a reader and a writer. “How a painting is finished is about being shut out as the artist—in the final instance, when some kind of balance has been struck that is bewildering, then I am redundant and the painting has its own nature, an ecosystem of intonations that no longer depends on me for them to be free and available to relate to in some kind of cluster of varied opportunities. It’s a point of responsibility, of knowing that the choices have amounted to this point and can’t be reversed. That vulnerability is what makes me feel the paintings as alive and true, but it’s also what pushes me out of the picture. In this there is a question of handwriting, of the body and the manual thought engendered by the act of painting. Does my hand have a life of its own, and what is that informed by? Is what I have done in the past or what I want to do in the future? Is it the paintings I have seen and loved, or what I have been told in the distant past?” As Cooke asks in each of these works from exercise book to canvas: What is painting of? What might it become?