Eden Jang

British artist Nigel Cooke introduces his pictorial exploration of interplay between memory and invention. Cooke’s intuitive infusion of his memories of real-life experiences and visited landscapes with a range of new ideas culminating in paintings that present the artist’s “psychological landscape.”[1]

Sunset Bathers demonstrates a scene with figures in which their presentation is imbued with abstraction and transparency. Putting emphasis on the process of his rendition, Cooke made his revisions of extra figures visible to the viewers. Different techniques are employed in his work, including troweling, scraping, staining, stenciling, aerosol spraying, acrylic, oil, and inks.[2] Getting all these instruments out, Cooke brings about symphony of materials, in which each little part has its own character, its unique role to play in the whole. As the title suggests, the painting implements a cold color scheme of blue that epitomize the summer chill, while simultaneously allowing shades of red and orange, warm tones that relate to the human spirit, appeal it prominence on canvas.

On the contrary, in Artist’s Garden 2, Cooke abandons layers of transparency and centralizes the viewers’ attention to a veiled figure at the middle. With its face and body parts covered in vibrant greens, this figure in this painting takes a rather lethargic posture, with its arms extending forwards and hands hanging low toward the ground. Two figures are holding each other tightly in the upper right corner, capturing a sense of anxiety, a type of feeling prevalent among modernity.

Surrealist artwork of Joan Miró’s Composition (1933) evokes parallelism with the works of Cooke, in which its setting is a “hazy atmospheric environment of washes,”[3] suggesting a sense of an eerie world. How both artists manifested strong abstractions in their paintings induce similar impression to the viewers at first glance, yet there exists a clear distinction in regards of timeliness. Figuration in Miró’s Composition suggest primordial and primitive activities such as play or fight—in the upper left corner, two figures are playing with or fighting over a ball. Furthermore, it encompasses bodily features that express sex, struggle, and fear. In contrast, Cooke intends to form a contemporary relationship with his own cognitive world and extends it on canvas. “[Cooke is] trying to get that multi-temporal feeling; it could be happening now or 100 years ago,”[4] Cooke addressed in his interview with Interview Magazine. His paintings are set in the past, present, and future all at once, and serves as a metaphor of his individual consciousness. Similarly, a quantitative view on composition that characterizes each of the two artists relates to such difference, as Miró uses a minimal vocabulary, which includes color and form, to create a mythic image evoking primal conditions, whereas Cooke, as aforementioned, employs a maximalist composition rendered through multiple layers of material, portraying a symphonic equivalent of the contemporary world, driven mostly out of his own consciousness.

Through the exhibition, Cooke communicates with the public and the contemporary world in his focus on the intensity of color. A real emphasis is put upon the spectral effects of color and how they create a sense of otherworldliness. Even with simple subjects, once the color becomes heightened, the viewers add another layer on reality. Cooke’s effort of rendering subject matters that are recognizable and ordinary, and taking them into a world where everything is unfamiliar resonates with the modern emphasis on the complexity of how we perceive phenomena of any kind through one’s personal consciousness.

---

[1] “Nigel Cooke,” Pace Gallery website, http://pace-production.s3.amazonaws.com/file_objects/press_release/985/_NigelCooke_HKpressrelease.pdf, accessed December 10, 2018

[2] “In the Studio with British Artist Nigel Cooke,” cobosocial.com, https://www.cobosocial.com/dossiers/in-the-studio-with-british-artist-nigel-cooke/ accessed December 10, 2018

[3] Penelope J. E. Davis et al., eds., Janson’s Short History of Art (Upper Saddle River: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2009), pp. 576.

[4] “Nigel Cooke’s Emotive Drive,” Interview Magazine website, https://www.interviewmagazine.com/art/nigel-cooke-black-mimosa, accessed December 10, 2018