Articles

For all the traditional romantic ideas emphasising individualism in art culture increasingly it has become accepted that serious work even before it leaves the studio and enters into the public domain is already, with respect to its meaning, in a dialogue or conversation with other work both contemporary and historical. This idea seems particularly relevant when encountering this body of work by Celia Cook, for not only do the individual works engage with other art but could also be seen to engage in conversation with each other. This series of paintings, in their play with constancy and difference around compressed and ‘tumbling’ forms and vivid, near acerbic colour relations seem like moments of suspended animation from a particularly gymnastic and hedonistic painterly work-out. Underlying and generating that play could be seen to be the two preoccupations that have been central to painting since the overt acknowledgement of the flatness of the picture plane by Cézanne.

First, the difficulty of placing curved shapes within a square once flatness has been acknowledged; something that one can see being battled with in Cubism, or Jasper John’s superimposed numerals. Unlike earlier artists, Cook’s work eschews direct representation (though in the curved forms she generates it is difficult not to read a degree of referencing to the organic or natural) but makes evident to us through her placement of those forms in relation to the edge as ‘containing’ and ‘constraining’ or ‘cropping’ how the painterly difficulties can be resolved.

Second, has been the preoccupation with how space and depth can be handled whilst acknowledging flatness, something that has underpinned nearly all significant twentieth century abstract painting. Despite the difference in scale it is not difficult to see visual and conceptual parallels concerning literal and depicted space between Cook’s paintings and Stella’s work of the Eighties. Their works share a similarity of curvilinear forms and at times paint handling: flatly applied areas of colour juxtaposed against modelled areas in the same work. But there is also a fundamental difference: Stella ruptured the picture plane and had real protrusions emanating from the work, as well as areas of illusionary depth, Cook has taken a purely painterly approach. In her work painted forms seem to appear from beneath other forms and arc and protrude towards us but this perception is challenged by the evident flatness and shallowness of that from behind which they seem to have arisen: not only are those forms presented in monochromatic palette-knife-spread-smooth paint, but their literal depth is underscored by allowing the boundaries of any under-painting and revisions to show through and emphasize just how little space there is between the surface of the paint and the surface of the canvas.

Though playful and exuberant in their mode, and in one sense concerned primarily with surface these paintings are far from unserious or unprofound.

Robin Marriner 13th Oct 2008

A field day for proud parents: my child of five could do better than this. But your child of five has a head start: he hasn’t studied art history yet, hasn’t got the vast weight of every other picture that was ever painted bearing down upon him, is still able to look at things and see what’s really there. But already his eyes are getting used to the idea of reading three-dimensional shapes in flat surfaces, and recognising real things from the flimsiest of representations. What will your child see when he looks at Celia Cook’s paintings: shapes that make faces, planes and castles, or shapes that are shapes, sort of squares, sort of rectangles, sort of circles. Will he see big paintings of big things, or big paintings of small things, viewed from close-up?

Few contemporary painters are more successful than Celia Cook in liberating themselves from the habits of a lifetime of eyesight and the demands of a pictorial tradition. In their attempts, some resort to rigorously methodical systems, others to an unbridled splurge with their materials. Celia Cook avoids both. Her compositions are cool and diagrammatic, their elements bound together by an internal logic, locked into tail-chasing movement, except where the artist deliberately trips them up by shaping the canvas into a cul-de-sac of converging perspectival lines. These particular canvases are titled The Circular Ruins, after a favorite story by Jorge Luis Borges, a mysterious story about the difficult boundary between self-fulfilment and futility.

There is trial and error in the creation of all these pictures: a satisfactory shape in a satisfactory colour but in the wrong place is physically moved to a different part of the canvas, the paint scraped off and repositioned. Inevitably its colour and texture are changed in the procedure, and traces of the scraped off areas remain as evidence of the process. And when this process is finished, what are these paintings like? They are like Celia Cook, and Celia Cook is open, honest and direct, determined not to be mysterious, and complex and mysterious in spite of herself.

John Gillett 1990