Page 6 - Art First: Christopher Cook: a chance encounter on the way down

Despite their relatively contained scale, these images are suggestive of dangers. They
form traps, or at least uncertainties, for the viewer who chooses to look into them
and participate in co-constructing their possible spaces. Areas of mass and conglom er -

ation appear unexpectedly high up, allowing light through beneath. Suggestions of land -
scape and of human structures that respond to it (terraces, paths, scaffold, ropes) are
real, but they can rarely be resolved with any consistency into a fully legible space
that the viewer can enter. The images are made with a formidable pictorial intelligence

[ ] that does not survey all that it beholds with any final satisfaction.They suggest, instead,

that con tem porary spaces and places present us with true difficulties of interpretation.

The artist’s interpretation of the image as it emerges − of the blots, wipes and marks−
offers a pattern for the viewer’s act of interpretation, looking over the artist’s shoulder

at what he chose to develop or leave.

Consider each new encounter −which, at first sight, is close to a version of pastoral. It is
unmistakably suggestive of agriculture, perhaps of a ploughed field in a narrow and

irregular dry valley. If this is an image of land, it is of land that has been carved into
a satisfying emblem of production through centuries. However, this space of a field that
you are apparently offered so straightforwardly− arranged so that the ploughed lines
rush towards a perspective point at the dead centre−can also be seen as some kind

of mound, stacking upwards. A doubtful aspect extends into the whole composition, and
especially into the lines suspended over or through it. These are made in a similar way
to the lines I have interpreted as furrows in the lower half of the image, with small trans -
verse marks. The lines cannot be resolved into either tracks−that pick out the way up

a hillside, and carve the topography of the valley into an interpretable way forward−

each new encounter,
, graphite and oil on paper, x

cm