Nigel Cooke paints as if Clara Peeters or Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder had devoted themselves to depicting the backs of busted-up buildings. Manchester-born Cooke, who received an MA from the Royal College of Art and a PhD from Goldsmith's, depicts graffiti flowers (along with birds, sunsets and disembodied brains) drinking and smoking like hooligans. Yet while the flowers are not acting pretty, the paintings are gorgeous; and just as the graffiti inject beauty into his imaginary scenes, Cooke's ability as an artist renders ugly spaces and urban trash as poetically as the fruits and fading flowers painted by his Flemish master predecessors. But Cooke's scenes are imagined and the apparent realism is an illusion.
With arresting skill, Cooke presents vast stretches of urban architecture punctuated by careful detail where weather beaten walls meet rocks, broken bottles and weeds. Without a hint of sentimentality, he makes the argument that art can elevate these pitiful surroundings as creepy, captivating, oversized graffiti murals loom over the debris.
Cooke has never identified himself as a graffiti writer. Still, even though he hasn't done serious time on the streets with a spray can, he manages to represent graffiti better than many of the medium's veterans and legends. Other artists try to replicate the kinetic energy and intensity which graffiti derives from its origin as an illegal art-form often created in seconds before the artist has to flee the site. But instead of painting like graffiti, Cooke paints graffiti itself. And by demonstrating how it can beautify and give voice to the devastated urban environments in which it is produced, he advocates graffiti's potential as a legitimate installation.
In a 2006 show at the South London gallery, Cooke presented ten large-scale paintings. The ambiguous narrative played on the wall in "Fun" shows a grey plant sucking on a cigarette as it oversees a group of humans, dressed vaguely like druids, who gather outside a barn door. While in our current natural order humans usually impose their will on nature, here the plant looks like the overlord and the people are pathetically puny in comparison. "County Club" is a magnificently bright painting full of the sharp, sun soaked colours of a Miami afternoon. The yellow orange light reflected from the concrete illuminates the
off-putting sights of a man outlined against a wall embracing a massive sad-looking banana and a pretty posey tipping on its stem and vomiting over an unfortunate weed drawn next to it.
The opening of Cooke's recent show, "New Accursed Art Club," at London's Stuart Shave/ Modern Art where he has shown since 2002, was so well attended by notable names including Claudia Schiffer and dealer Andrea Rosen, that it was described on Artforum.com as, "Artists great and small, glacially groomed international collectors, dealers, curators, family members, and jovial gate-crashers - nobody, but nobody, it seems, doesn't love Stuart Shave. And everybody, but everybody, was queuing up to buy Cooke's work. In terms of positive vibes and support, this event was a love-in." Yet, despite Cooke's success and the attention his work rightfully garners, the experience of seeing his paintings in the flesh is startling and his canvases retain their power to inspire renewed appreciation for the drab scenes surroundings that most urbanites willfully over-look, and for the demanding quality of painterly skill too many gallery-goers have learned not to expect.
'New Accursed Art Club', 2007
Ana Finel Honigman: Why have details from your larger urban scapes now been enlarged to take over the whole canvas?
Nigel Cooke: Up until recently the paintings have been divided by a horizon separating 'real' landscape from graffiti backdrops. I always wanted to collapse the distinction between the two, but it's not that simple, you can't just tear it down and start again. Not if you're interested in pursuing similar ideas in a different direction. These things have to be worked through in their own time, or else you lose the good stuff by forcing change for reasons that may be arbitrary, like mere boredom, or wanting to do a different looking painting. These kinds of banal conceptions can provide novelty and diversion, but ultimately undermine the work's capacity to convince. The enlargement that you can see in this show may look sudden but is in fact a product of a slow process of change that can be traced back through about two years' work. It began with small crossovers from one to the other, such as light from a graffiti pumpkin spreading across the division into the real foreground, or a spade wielded by a graffiti figure creating a fissure in a real adjoining landscape. I started this move away from the division of the painted space into two elements because I felt that the terms it created were too restful, too helpful somehow in the spectator's experience of sorting out what was what. It seemed more important to confound the process of resolving the logic of the picture, both for the people who look at the paintings and for me as the one who has a working relationship with the image. The scene that results from this scrambling of the space is more unusual and distorted, lacking the sensible scale relationships and anchors. Perhaps this is why they seem like enlargements.
'Theme Park', 2008
AFH: Were you concerned that you had developed too formulaic or recognizable a style?
NC: It's easy to get tired of your own solutions. Or maybe solutions are the things to avoid at all costs. In painting, what you want is problems. Splicing the drawn fictions with the naturalistic landscape presents all kinds of formal and thematic problems that in turn generate unpredictable results.
AFH: There are certain forms and characters that keep coming back in your imagery, like the sad fruit or smoking objects. What are their origins and why repeat them?
NC: These figures are always evolving too. They started small some time ago, grew in size and importance for me, and some are now on the wane. In my new show there are a few of the fruits, but they are a bit wretched, like geriatric versions of my earlier images. The repetition comes from me trying to build a relationship with them. Characters and objects enter the world of the work out of some sort of fascination on my part that I don't quite understand. The paintings think them through in a way, until I develop my own understanding of why I was drawn to them in the first place. For me painting is an arena that mimics thought, allowing you to generate something like a second brain where attractions and impulses can be worked through in the open. It's an amusing way of exploring what sort of images are out there, and what kind of hold they have on you.
'Painter's Lunch,' 2008
AFH: What hold does the smoking fruit have on you?
NC: The smoking fruit is a wholesome life-giving object of nourishment that has been polluted by its own excesses and addictions. They are like the kind of fruit and veg characters sometimes found in kids' books, only it's as if they've been tracked down after 30 years of alcoholism, heartbreak and overwork. The smoking thing in general is a device I use to suggest inertia, free-time, idling and reflection. Although I've never smoked, the fag break always seemed like an expanded moment, a sense of time extended yet also compressed into a tiny space. When I was a student, older painters always seemed to smoke when gazing at their work for long periods. There was always an air of defeat to that action.
AFH: Were you ever a tagger?
NC: I designed some tags for people at school who were unable to create them for themselves, and of course ended up with one of my own. But I never used it. The thought of it made me feel stupid. There was never the need to scribble all over other people's property, it didn't appeal to me.
AFH: If it didn't appeal to you, then why make it the subject of your work?
NC: My work quotes graffiti the way a guy at a dinner party might quote Sherlock Holmes or Alan Sugar or whoever, or do an impression of somebody. It's assuming a voice, it's not really me.
AFH: Are you interested in graffiti from a pedestrian's perspective? What do you think of the aesthetic changes in graffiti, from spray paint to wheat-paste to stickers and more experimental forms of uninvited public art?
NC: I think they add texture and humanity to the boring and ugly parts of the city, and it's good to see new things springing up all the time. But it's depressing when you see stuff that's clearly been done by art students trying too hard. I think this is why I don't comment on graffiti too much; it's something done by people whose lives are too different to mine. At least it should be. It comes from difficulties that I don't have, like being young or unemployed or whatever. I see it and get affected by it like the rest of us, but it's not really my business, my area.
'To Work Is To Play,' 2008
AFH: For the people who create it, do you think graffiti is still a relevant form of anti-social, rebellious expression, as it was in the eighties or sometime after?
NC: The graffiti feel emerges in my work because I don't value it very much on the whole. Most of the stuff you see on the streets is just a desperate mess. It's a crappy form of democratic representation which fits quite nicely with the negative side of my paintings, and offsets and confuses the voices in the work that are more naturally or perhaps habitually 'me'. But that's from the 'artistic' point of view, which is kind of irrelevant if you're a kid in Dalston tagging the side of a garage. I'm not against it in the world at large. I think for the people that do it, it probably stops them from going insane. I think it's relevant because it reminds people of marginal groups and the difficulties of others. My own aesthetic interest in it is more along the lines of how, when it's grand in scale, it can create incident and even illusion in the urban landscape, and when it's smaller or quicker it becomes the index for a kind of nervous subjectivity that is compelling, even romantic. It's not rebellious in the same way now as it was in the 80's, I don't think. I remember a kid in my class at school trying to do a talk on graffiti and getting sent to the headmaster. That wouldn't happen anywhere now; it sounds ridiculous even to me who was there.
AFH: How do you think of your work in relation to the tradition of Western landscape painting?
NC: I think I've felt different affinities at different times, but on the whole I feel my paintings come out of an interest in hybridizing genre classifications by treating a landscape like a still-life, or a portrait like a landscape. I'd like to make my paintings expansive enough to allow any of my interests in painting's history to be included. Whether this approach to the site of my scenarios connects them to a historical timeline in landscape I'm not sure; I only try to draw upon things that catch my interest, and to construct a topographical vision of them as intensely and imaginatively as possible. In a way it's like envisioning the history of landscape painting as a giant national park, into which has stumbled the portraits and a few rotten still-lifes. That suddenly sounds like what Picasso did with Manet's 'Dejeuner sur l'herbe': a recycling into oblivion.
AFH: You also hold a PhD in art history. What is your area and does your scholarly engagement with art influence or inform your practice?
NC: It wasn't really in art history, although there were bits of that in there, as well as philosophy and critical theory and some other stuff loosely from the information physics world. But it was about painting. At the time there were a few ideas in painting around that I found boring and phony and I just wanted to get to the bottom of things for myself. That was the starting point anyway. In the end it was like a fantastic journey into a private obsession, and it changed everything for me. Changed the way I approach my work. Much of the material I encountered was riveting and hugely inspirational, and the chaotic feeling of my paintings is perhaps a product of trying to fit lots of exciting things together in one narrative, like you would in a book. Making leaps between theoretical realities and building complex and convincing justifications for them is a painstaking process, but it's difficult to kick the habit. My paintings are an attempt to do this visually, in a way. Theoretical engagement is really the background to how I approach my work at all levels.
ANA FINEL HONIGMAN is a critic, PhD candidate in art history at Oxford University and Senior London Correspondent for the Saatchi Gallery's online magazine. She is Art Editor of Alef (alefmag.com) and contributes regularly to such publications as Style.com, Grazia, Tank, Sleek and Harper's Bazaar.
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