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 nigel cooke interview
 to access audio and video on collective you need real player.Smoking brains at the South London Gallery. In front of you is a blank wall. At first it looks like every concrete block filling every urban space in Britain. In Nigel Cooke’s world, however, these walls become giant pieces of drawing paper covered in excessive spreads of childlike scrawled graffiti. There are lots of layers to the Manchester-born, London-based artist’s work. Sometimes they are literal layers – the realistic lush foreground layered over the graffiti echoing the “real world’s” weeds and urban decay. Fantasy-fused drawings layered over the “walls” themselves. Imagery pours out of these canvas murals – strange, fantastical, hyperreal.  Country Club (detail) and Sigil (detail). The layers are also metaphorical. According to Cooke, his work plays with the history and relevance of painting itself – representation, technique, abstraction, fantasy and realism are all explored here. The reason why this works is that Cooke is technically a brilliant painter. He can do perfectly lush nature alongside urban pop culture simplicity with shocking ease. His often giant canvases become views on fantasy city streets where graffiti writers are transformed into Renaissance artists, creating Brueghel-like hooded pilgrim figures. At the same time the imagery is fused with a primary-school fascination with Halloween pumpkins, vomiting daisies and smoking brains. It’s a brilliant contrast – like Dürer illustrating Enid Blyton.  Food (detail) and Ideas (detail). Cooke’s taste for the gothic is almost light and childlike. Although there are lots of skulls, mummies, death and decay here, his work is not nihilistic or depressing. He argues that the work represents the rebirth of creativity after everything else has decayed away – a fitting allegory for the medium of painting itself. Nigel Cooke proves that painting is experiencing a representational rebirth after years of boring abstraction. It’s about time someone did something new with a brush.
Francesca Gavin
Nigel Cooke - A Portrait Of Everything is at the South London Gallery until 14 May 06.
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