Two years spent in India changed Cook's approach to painting from one of western composition and notation (and colour) to a more haptic, intimate practice in which sand drawings made in Varanasi inspired his switch to monochrome graphite. These ‘graphites’ were quickly exhibited internationally and became part of major collections of several major art institutions. His works have also been awarded several major painting prizes, including one at the prestigious John Moores Liverpool.
Recent works by Christopher Cook, made with liquid graphite on paper, are both composed and disconcerting. They seem to derive closely from modern experiences and understandings, but it is not immediately easy to say how. They present specific, not generalised, landscape-type events, but look closely and you cannot be sure what the details actually explain or identify.
Ian Hunt
Recent works by Christopher Cook, made with liquid graphite on paper, are both composed and disconcerting. They seem to derive closely from modern experiences and understandings, but it is not immediately easy to say how. They present specific, not generalised, landscape-type events, but look closely and you cannot be sure what the details actually explain or identify. Gravity is not consistently acknowledged, and the angle of view may shift or reverse within the same image. Black and white become strangely suggestive of harsh light and heat. Diverse pictorial traditions (Symbolist graphic art, Chinese literati painting, Persian miniatures) cross-fertilise and contaminate each other, but it seems clear that these works are made in the present rather than the past ... we are in the presence of something involved and immediate. The unusually hard, ungiving surface of the paper makes the liquid marks volatile and restless.
Volatility might be a good place to start. Substances such as the white spirit the artist uses rapidly give off their vapour; situations that are volatile may develop or change as you observe them. You cannot be sure what you are looking at but it seems to matter, to be more than a game, that you grasp it. The images rely on chance for aspects of their manufacture but are far removed from a feeling of arbitrariness in their final effect.
Despite their relatively contained scale, these images are suggestive of dangers. They form traps, or at least uncertainties, for the viewer who chooses to look into them and participate in co-constructing their possible spaces. Areas of mass and conglomeration appear unexpectedly high up, allowing light through beneath. Suggestions of land- scape and of human structures that respond to it (terraces, paths, scaffold, ropes) are real, but they can rarely be resolved with any consistency into a fully legible space that the viewer can enter. The images are made with a formidable pictorial intelligence that does not survey all that it beholds with any final satisfaction. They suggest, instead, that contemporary spaces and places present us with true difficulties of interpretation. The artist’s interpretation of the image as it emerges − of the blots, wipes and marks − offers a pattern for the viewer’s act of interpretation, looking over the artist’s shoulder at what he chose to develop or leave.
Cook feels an affinity for Tadashi Kawamata’s work, in which crazily improvised wood structures insinuate walkways, tree houses and confusion into the space of cities, in a manner that recalls (but does not repeat) the delicate balancing of human intrusion into nature in traditional Japanese thinking. Such interventions make something more complex than simple chaos, in that they appear to be falling apart at the same time that they are being built. They are spirited demonstrations of collective, capable effort, and of a kind of madness denied by the apparently rational spaces they colonise. This co-presence of lightness and seriousness, of constructive and deconstructive thinking, can be seen to connect with Cook’s strenuous feats of ambiguous picturing. The lack of coherence his works demonstrate is not a simple stylistic gambit. The interpenetration of contradictory viewpoints and values is perceived, grasped and held before us as some kind of defining hallucination of our time and of the material world we are making (and forced to observe being made). What I wrote first in my notebook was ‘If this is a disaster, let’s look at it’. The artist writes, on the subject of lightness, ‘The drawings see-saw on a dilemma: that lightness, however desirable, is not always possible. To live lightly, without undue stress, may be desired, but we feel that desire most acutely when working in situations where weight, and conscience, cannot be avoided.’ The idea of living lightly represents neither withdrawal nor ambivalence: his images are manifestly open to the excitement and complexity of our globalised present. Perhaps it is the hint of a moral dimension in them that marks his work as European (or vestigially English) in his modes of openness to that present.
Ian Hunt until recently taught at Goldsmiths College in London, and is a freelance writer on art and architecture.
Volatile Invention
Recent works by Christopher Cook, made with liquid graphite on paper, are both composed and disconcerting. They seem to derive closely from modern experiences and understandings, but it is not immediately easy to say how. They present specific, not generalised, landscape-type events, but look closely and you cannot be sure what the details actually explain or identify. Gravity is not consistently acknowledged, and the angle of view may shift or reverse within the same image. Black and white become strangely suggestive of harsh light and heat. Diverse pictorial traditions (Symbolist graphic art, Chinese literati painting, Persian miniatures) cross-fertilise and contaminate each other, but it seems clear that these works are made in the present rather than the past ... we are in the presence of something involved and immediate. The unusually hard, ungiving surface of the paper makes the liquid marks volatile and restless.
Volatility might be a good place to start. Substances such as the white spirit the artist uses rapidly give off their vapour; situations that are volatile may develop or change as you observe them. You cannot be sure what you are looking at but it seems to matter, to be more than a game, that you grasp it. The images rely on chance for aspects of their manufacture but are far removed from a feeling of arbitrariness in their final effect.
Despite their relatively contained scale, these images are suggestive of dangers. They form traps, or at least uncertainties, for the viewer who chooses to look into them and participate in co-constructing their possible spaces. Areas of mass and conglomeration appear unexpectedly high up, allowing light through beneath. Suggestions of land- scape and of human structures that respond to it (terraces, paths, scaffold, ropes) are real, but they can rarely be resolved with any consistency into a fully legible space that the viewer can enter. The images are made with a formidable pictorial intelligence that does not survey all that it beholds with any final satisfaction. They suggest, instead, that contemporary spaces and places present us with true difficulties of interpretation. The artist’s interpretation of the image as it emerges − of the blots, wipes and marks − offers a pattern for the viewer’s act of interpretation, looking over the artist’s shoulder at what he chose to develop or leave.
Cook feels an affinity for Tadashi Kawamata’s work, in which crazily improvised wood structures insinuate walkways, tree houses and confusion into the space of cities, in a manner that recalls (but does not repeat) the delicate balancing of human intrusion into nature in traditional Japanese thinking. Such interventions make something more complex than simple chaos, in that they appear to be falling apart at the same time that they are being built. They are spirited demonstrations of collective, capable effort, and of a kind of madness denied by the apparently rational spaces they colonise. This co-presence of lightness and seriousness, of constructive and deconstructive thinking, can be seen to connect with Cook’s strenuous feats of ambiguous picturing. The lack of coherence his works demonstrate is not a simple stylistic gambit. The interpenetration of contradictory viewpoints and values is perceived, grasped and held before us as some kind of defining hallucination of our time and of the material world we are making (and forced to observe being made). What I wrote first in my notebook was ‘If this is a disaster, let’s look at it’. The artist writes, on the subject of lightness, ‘The drawings see-saw on a dilemma: that lightness, however desirable, is not always possible. To live lightly, without undue stress, may be desired, but we feel that desire most acutely when working in situations where weight, and conscience, cannot be avoided.’ The idea of living lightly represents neither withdrawal nor ambivalence: his images are manifestly open to the excitement and complexity of our globalised present. Perhaps it is the hint of a moral dimension in them that marks his work as European (or vestigially English) in his modes of openness to that present.
Ian Hunt until recently taught at Goldsmiths College in London, and is a freelance writer on art and architecture.