Graphite (noun): A blackish soft allotropic form of carbon in hexagonal crystalline form: used in pencils, crucibles, and electrodes, as a lubricant, as a moderator in nuclear reactors. 

Christopher Cook’s recent practice has consisted solely of what he calls ‘graphites’: works on paper (and occasionally aluminium) using graphite powder dissolved in turpentine, oil and resin. His name for them evokes their uncertain status, especially in relation to painting on the one hand and drawing on the other. Why not call them ‘drawings’? Graphite on paper, after all, is drawing’s single most ubiquitous mode. Besides which, being made of graphite, these works are achromatic or monochromatic - depending on how you define grey - an attribute we again most readily identify with drawing, at least if we define it in opposition to painting. 

Cook’s graphites, though, are doused in a turpentine-based medium, and turpentine’s toxic odour is itself enough to underline the absence of oil colour, with which it has been so heroically paired down the centuries. Besides this, we can tell from the quality of marks that the images once existed in a fluid state associated with painting, as opposed to drawing. They seem situated roughly at a mid-point between the two disciplines, but in a manner that does not seem static. Instead, they veer towards one or the other, according to how we perceive and conceptualise them at any given moment, and, in any case, to describe the graphites as painting/drawing hybrids still seems inadequate: they allude to yet other media. For instance, their surfaces have a metallic quality, leaden and glistening by turns, which lends them the look of early black and white photographs. The paper Cook uses is thick, shiny and non-porous, much like photographic paper. Many of the graphites feature large areas of mid-grey, which on close inspection reveal a fine ‘grain’ - as we would say of a photograph - made up of tiny, suspended graphite particles. Often, they are governed by a dramatic and strange depth of field: images appear caught in sharp focus against often disconcertingly murky environments. Here and there a wave or eddy of turps creates the impression that these are images in the process of emerging in trays of developer. Various allusions to photography and its processes give the works a slightly mechanistic feel that keeps the idiosyncrasies and lyricism of much of the mark-making and some of the imagery in check. Crucially, it also gives them a documentary edge, as if we should take these dream-like images for reality. 

In one recent work, something resembling a light meter runs down one side of the image, as if we are observing through a camera viewfinder. Earlier images feature ornate curtains, proscenium arches and transparent domes. These various frames and enclosures stand in the way of our relationship with the action that is situated beyond or within, reminding us that we have no direct access to the source, and signalling that what we are looking at is itself a construction. Such devices also speak of an ambivalent facet of experience, that of being excluded  - of being situated on the outside of something beyond our control or comprehension. 

Some of these graphites offer the viewer an almost forensic role. Even when the forms appear abstract there is still some sense that together they represent a system, challenging the viewer to determine the configuration’s true purpose. The resemblance to photography underscores the impression that in these bare ciphers lies encrypted information. As well as resembling something we might see with the naked eye, objects also exist on a micro or macroscopic scale, the graphite particles evoking galaxies, wet sand or sub-atomic particles, sometimes simultaneously. When that happens, the framing devices at the edges no longer recall dashboards or doorways, but instead read as eyepieces to telescopes or microscopes - we’re not sure which. Cook’s works revel in making extreme shifts in scale believable, as when a long tubular amoebic form shares the same space as a pond or copse, or when the overwrought arms of a baroque chandelier behave like plankton. The results are perplexing, deliberately playing havoc with our ordering systems (chemical, astronomical, digital, industrial, art historical, biological etc.). 

It is clear that Cook's images delight in the coexistence of the incongruous. The landscapes he represents, like those in which Smithson made earthworks, often lie on the fringes of the built world, "at the edge of our lives", as Cook puts it, "where the systems we rely on start to fray". Smithson described such a place in ‘A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey’ (1967), a work in the form of a slide show and essay. In his photographs, as in many of the graphites, ugly bits of industrial infrastructure assume unexpected symbolic significance: a set of six pipes spewing filth into a river, for example, is christened ‘The Fountain Monument’. It may seem a stretch to make a connection between Cook’s works on paper with Smithson’s earthworks, but there is correspondence on the level of material, as well as content, the graphite drawn directly from underground seams (disused mines, Smithson argued, made ideal sites for earthworks). Once dissolved in the medium Cook will often allow it to follow its own course. This physical or geological aspect of the graphites may have more in common with process and anti-form sculpture (for instance Smithson’s own Asphalt Rundown (1969) or Richard Serra’s molten lead Splash Piece (1969) than gestural abstraction in painting. 

Our inability to discern an overall narrative in these landscapes, despite the almost uncanny sense that one exists, is a little like the experience of deja vu. Cook’s images don’t so much seem dredged from dreams, as with Surrealism, but from those moments when submerged memories unexpectedly re-surface. Deja vu strikes with an overwhelming sense of significance, yet is not attributable to a particular source, or that source, in itself, seems banal. Typically, we are uncertain whether we are recalling an actual event, or something imagined or dreamt. Perhaps Christopher Cook’s graphites could be located somewhere between realism and surrealism, but if we are speaking psychologically they seem to belong to that brief lacuna of time shortly before we wake, when our conscious minds exert some indefinable control on the narrative of our dreams. 

Alex Farquharson was appointed Director of Tate Britain in 2015. He previously taught the MA curating course at the Royal College of Art, London and wrote extensively on contemporary art, contributing to Frieze, Artforum and Art Monthly. As an independent curator he curated at British Art Show 6 (with Andrea Schlieker) before becoming director of Nottingham Contemporary between 2007 and 2015.