Indepth Arts News:
"Christopher Cook : Concrete Firmament"
2010-05-13 until 2010-06-19
Mary Ryan Gallery
New York, NY,
USA United States of America
Mary Ryan Gallery is pleased to announce "Concrete
Firmament," Christopher Cook's third solo show at the gallery.
Continuing to work in liquid graphite (graphite powders,
oil, and resin) on aluminum panels or coated paper, in this
new sequence of images Cook explores the formal and
psychological qualities of road tunnels. In doing so he is also able to reconsider an earlier fascination with worlds within worlds, and encapsulated space.
These ‘graphites’ contain both photographic (or cinematic)
and painterly elements, often in the same image. Cook’s
method lends an enigmatic air to the everyday, allowing him
to suggest the proximity of apparently unrelated emotions,
such as fear and nostalgia. The same method also emphasizes the connection between our experience of the world and the means by
which we form such experience.
Certain works in the exhibition were made in response to video footage shot by the artist on Italian major roads (autostrada) between
Florence and Bologna, and between Lucca and Genova, during the spring of 2008. The film reflects upon the road journey between
churches decorated with powerful image sequences: for instance, from the mosaics of San Vitale, Ravenna to the frescoes by Fra
Angelico in the monastic cells of San Marco, Florence. “Driving back through tunnels after one visit, I discovered that some of the
orange-lit tunnels were resonating on physical, intellectual and emotional levels. They rhymed profoundly with the deeper nature
of some of the Italian churches I’d just visited, with their domed spaces, golden light, velvety shadows, and perhaps also in their
intimation of a different sphere of existence. ” The graphite works, by contrast, expand upon what is experienced in passing--illusory
fragments of the journey transformed into complex energized spaces. These static tunnel images become meditative and also
hallucinatory, imbuing them with a strong psychic implication which reflects Cook’s sense that they “are both stressful and enchanting.”
Cook speaks of the potential - and the necessity - for intense experience to compel the human spirit to actions that can transcend
instinct, and he finds this potential both in tunnel-travelling, and in the act of transformation that occurs in making art. “Wild World,”
(2009) a work on paper, the viewer’s gaze is lead through a slick, metallic tunnel toward lush, windswept greenery. The dualities
present in this work - light and dark, hard and soft, interior and exterior - create a dynamic that not only conveys the magical sense of
encapsulated space, a realm ‘out-of-place’, but also of consciousness moving towards a fierce, intrusive light.
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