Page 5 - Art First: Christopher Cook: a chance encounter on the way down

VOLATILE INVENTION Ian Hunt

Recent works by Christopher Cook, made with liquid graphite on paper, are both [
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composed and disconcerting. They seem to derive closely from modern experiences
and understandings,but it is not immediately easy to say how.They present specific, not

generalised, landscape-type events, but look closely and you cannot be sure what the
details actually explain or identify. Gravity is not consistently acknowledged, and the
angle of view may shift or reverse within the same image. Black and white become
strangely suggestive of harsh light and heat. Diverse pictorial traditions (Symbolist

graphic art, Chinese literati painting, Persian miniatures) cross-fertilise and contaminate
each other, but it seems clear that these works are made in the present rather than
the past. In contrast with the disturbing calmness of Carol Rhodes’s paintings, which
show views of human intervention into landscape as seen from a low-flying aircraft, we

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are in the presence of something involved and immediate. The unusually hard, ungiv ng
surface of the paper makes the liquid marks volatile and restless. Volatility might be
a good place to start. Substances such as the white spirit the artist uses rapidly give
off their vapour; situations that are volatile may develop or change as you observe them.

You cannot be sure what you are looking at but it seems to matter, to be more than
a game, that you grasp it. The images rely on chance for aspects of their manufacture
but are far removed from a feeling of arbitrariness in their final effect.