Every Wall is a Door

2021-09-27T15:42:00.000Z

Seen through the prism of the mid-20th century, the modern world was utopian, sleek, and functional. The perceived tension between the modern – characterised as rational, and progressive – and its countercultural other, nature, is united by the dual forces of geometry and light. Present in nature, from the hexagonal prism of a snowflake to the visible semi-circle of a rainbow, natural geometries underpin our world. Although championing industrial materials such as steel, glass, concrete, modernism doesn’t in fact deny the natural world but grows from it. Aluminium, the base of Cooke’s paintings, is both space age and natural (the most common metal in the Earth’s crust.)

Cooke toys with modernism’s fascination with new media, materials, and technologies but also the movement’s tendency to prioritise light, perhaps the most natural of elements. While modernism was far from the only artistic movement to prioritise light, the metaphorical associations afforded it as both subject and inspiration were immense. Light offered an essence of optimism and infinity. Architects like Le Corbusier used it to inspire a sense of the divine and the poetic in buildings, drawing on its intensity and daily changes to bring the outdoors inside. In modernist design, as in these architecturally inflected paintings, the static and sculptural verges on kinetic. In Cooke’s work light, dark, and shadow dance across metal surfaces, shifting the eye from one geometric form to the next along angular lines. This interplay between form and light defines Cooke’s practice, evoking the machine age and the promise its forms and forces signalled.

Text by Kelly Carmichael
January 2021

Every wall is a door (Apartment) 2021-01-05T17:41:00.000Z

Primer, acrylic on aluminium panel, powdercoated aluminium frame

120x100cm