BOOK:Nigel Cooke Paintings 2019-2025, Pace Publishing

“Nigel Cooke – Paintings 2019–2025” by Pace Publishing is a compact but ambitious monograph that gathers work from a pivotal six-year span in Cooke’s practice. The book functions both as a visual catalogue and as a sustained argument about how Cooke has pushed his painterly language into denser, more atmospheric territories. Layout, sequencing, and reproduction quality make the book feel like an exhibition in your hands: images are given room to breathe, and the editorial choices emphasize progression and recurrence rather than a simple chronological checklist.

The reproductions are consistently strong: color fidelity and scale choices preserve the tactile sense of Cooke’s surfaces—those layered, scumbled passages where pigment seems to have been both applied and excavated. Paper stock and binding are restrained and durable, letting the paintings take center stage without flashy design interventions. Small-format close-ups are used judiciously to reveal brushwork and texture, while full-bleed spreads allow the more monumental canvases to assert their physical presence. The book’s material restraint mirrors Cooke’s own balance between muscular mark-making and atmospheric restraint.

Across 2019–2025 Cooke’s work in this volume repeatedly returns to landscape as psychological architecture: hills, scaffolds, and ambiguous structures appear as loci for memory, threat, and shelter. There’s a persistent tension between figuration and abstraction—forms emerge from, and dissolve into, dense fields of paint. Color shifts are notable: earlier works in the sequence often rely on dusky, earthen palettes, while later canvases introduce sharper, sometimes acidic accents that destabilize the compositions. This period also shows Cooke refining his spatial ambiguities—planes that tilt, horizons that compress—so that pictorial depth becomes a site of emotional compression rather than mere illusionistic space. -Dimitris Lempesis