Cook’s use of graphite powder – raw carbon – returns his work to the elemental. Some of his earliest experiments fell off the paper as dust, appropriate given that the method derived from sand drawings he made in India during the mid 90’s. A resinous medium now holds the surface, but the ‘graphites’ - as he terms them - are still not absorbed into their ground, and remain just a granule thin.
There are no studies in the orthodox sense: each work is performed in real time rather than constructed as a sequence of layers. According to the artist “each day in the studio there is either a success, or the day turns out to be a rehearsal in which some things work and some things go wrong, in which case everything must be wiped clean and begun again.” Thus the act of painting is pursued through many forms until an image is recognised – perhaps as something that has always existed, which just needed to be shown.
Each work radiates the nervous charge of this decision-making, this wrestling with chance, and the continual risk of loss. The mercurial quality of the graphite might be seen as integral to this process, not least because it is monochromatic: “the possibility for improvisation is extended because there is no colour to point in set directions. I can recognise this in the mists of Chinese and Japanese painting, a miasma in which one searches, and from which gradually form emerges…”
As with the Hokusai waterfalls he has made visual reference to, Cook weighs noise against silence, and power against fixture, but not as compositional counterpoint. Rather, balance evolves gradually, contemplatively.
Ten years of focus on graphite and a concern with Eastern aesthetics emphasises lightness of touch, because the material is so sensitive and so tractable. Yet the images also possess a gritty integrity that opposes this lightness, to address our human condition: the flicker between dreamtime and wakefulness, surreal and rational, extraordinary and the everyday. “some days the images go off in a direction that leads me towards the world, on other days, perhaps because of the process, or the mood, they head in the opposite direction, driving me inwards to an obscurer realm, which can only be understood once the final image emerges.”
Intrigued by the Indian concept of maya, in which the veil of our own preconceptions (often a pragmatic necessity) may close us off from profound experience, Cook attempts to show these properties - of everyday and extraordinary - in agile proximity. Hence the title of the exhibition, aerial jetty. It is an allusion to a 1999 poem by the artist, in which a field covered with plastic sheeting causes a dark hedgerow to ‘become’ a promontory from which vessels are imagined departing the Earth. That fanciful conceit allowed him to consider the delusions of the imagination – but also its importance as a means of deciphering the ‘real’
Though grounded in the behaviour of the natural world, Cook’s processes can also throw up very quotidian concerns – the terrible beauty of a bombing, a helicopter forcing the observer to the ground. Above all, these striking painted-drawings consider ways of being – of living with or against nature, of being fluent or stubborn, poetic or political. Time is stretched, tides are halted, evolution runs back and forth, fluid becomes rock, solid becomes liquid…
(quotations from interview with Tadeshi Kawamata, curator, Yokohama Triennale, Japan 2005)