On the Composstibility of Painting – Suhail Malik
How many worlds are there?
Nigel Cooke's paintings pose this question with an insistence that's hard to ignore. It's certainly not the only question, pleasure, or thought to be had from these paintings but in each piece and across what we have of Cooke's work to date the unity and integrity – the unicity - of the world is again and again put to task. The world we're talking about here is that of the painting, what is happening across the picture plane, and also the world of the viewer, the world as you understand it since encountering these paintings. Already, then, we're speaking about two worlds. But this alteration to the integrity of the world as you thought you knew it is a just a general condition of any encounter that you need to come to understand: you see that there is another world or, at least, a world that isn't yours – yet. Cooke's paintings elaborate and exploit this general condition of strangeness or foreignness with their own singularity and demand for eve