ART-PREVIEW:Nigel Cooke-Roman Willow

Nigel Cooke’s paintings create mazes for the mind. Looking at his large-scale surfaces, the viewer becomes entrapped by illusionary depths and a feeling that something apocalyptic is about to happen just outside the painting’s edge. In his new solo exhibition in London, the artist presents a drastic departure from his earlier work.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Pace Gallery Archive

In his solo exhibition “Roman Willow”, Nigel Cooke presents a new body of work that takes inspiration from his local environment and places such as Córdoba, Formentera, Rome and the Italian Alps. He paints these scenes not as they appear but as he remembers them, working in a highly intuitive manner to transform his memory of the textures and feelings of a place into a constellation of marks that form into an evocative image. As he said in an interview at Fad Magazine: “I Felt this freedom to reinvent my work in totality, to risk that maybe the paintings wouldn’t happen at all without the props and things that had clustered in them previously. What I ended up with is these strange part-autobiographical scenarios that are about blending experience, memory and ideas in an all-enveloping textural field, within which a figure or group of figures exists loosely. The paintings often have the palette of the landscapes in specific geographical regions I have been to, or are distortions of personal experiences of place”. The new paintings are characterized by ghost figures mostly female, amidst sensorial landscapes. Logs, sunburnt grass and wisps of smoke emanate a palpable sense of sound, smell and temperature. This quality of the paint adds an emotional resonance to the natural elements of the paintings, particularly the fires blazing on felled trees that recur across this group of work. The suggestion of songs that cannot be heard introduces an enigmatic quality. It similarly underlines the inherent musicality in each work and emphasizes the way Cooke pushes at the expressive potential of painting, opening it to all of the senses.

Info: Pace Gallery, 6 Burlington Gardens, London, Duration: 21/9-22/10/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.pacegallery.com