It’s all lies. One belief system just replaces the other. When packaged prettily we buy into it. It’s only when we strip it of its pink veneer that we get anywhere close to the truth. This truth being just another lie in a constant, depressing game of ‘pass the parcel’. We started with a marvellous, large bundle of optimism and end with the reality of a crappy toy. We are filled with nothing but emptiness.
Over the last two years Paul Crook’s painting has gravitated back towards figuration, away from a fairly pure form of abstraction. Such a shift always brings with it a certain fascination with the choices the artist makes in terms of subject matter. By which I mean both the iconography they harness and the nature of meaning they are grappling with.
Houses, petrol stations and the exteriors and interiors of cars are the recurrent visions of Paul Crook’s recent work. What should we make of this? A temporary deviation is necessary at this point to justify my mode of analysis.
The iconographic decisions of an image maker are both simplistic and complex. Simplistic in that they are driven to a particular sign or symbol by urge. A complexity exists, however, in the minutiae of an artist’s selection, the manner of their continued interest and the nature of their manipulation. The later need not concern the artist, all that matters in the instinct which drives them to using that symbol in their practise. This is not to say the maker does not have awareness of the complexities, just that they need not be suffocated by it. Its role is to cause activity, not paralysis. The fact remains that the values and nuances of the symbol are inherent in ever stage of the process, from selection through to manipulation. Most importantly, however, is the fact that the artist hold no omnipresent position in regards to the question of ‘why’, they are merely the makers of the ‘what’. Barthes’ inflammatory 1968 essay ‘Death of the Author’ is perhaps a little two dogmatic in its post structuralist manifesto feel. It does, however, bring awareness to the fact that the image is a multifaceted creation, defined by a number of contexts and producers, of which the artist is only one. The viewer image relationship is the most central in a field of unccentralised modes of analysis.
So… why cars, houses and petrol stations? On the simplest level Paul Crook is painting what he knows, the familiar, and the everyday. Reason enough of course. In doing this he straight away aligns himself with a long lineage of ‘realism’. It is a Baudellairrian tradition which separates itself from the hind minded and distant subject matter of many earlier makers. T. J. Clarke, perhaps the most celebrated writer on Courbet and Manet,) would tell us that it very much an anti bourgeoisie, working class mode of practise. The over simplistic, methodologically flawed and inverse snobbery of Clarke’s writing need not be deconstructed here. Needless to say I think he is wrong. The choice to focus on that which is around us, in our own time and own place, is just a logical extension of a longer history which moved us towards this point. It’s the result of a freeing of certain creative restraints, nothing more revolutionary or subversive than that.
The method of deconstruction in the images, therefore, is not one of social or biographical context but a more primary form of research with the images themselves. The questions we ask when we view Paul Crook’s work are these, and in this order. What associations do we have with the subjects he choices. What does his manipulation of these images do? Finally, what does the relationship between these values seem to present in terms of meaning? That is the what, how and why of image making.
The houses speak to us of homes, but through their not specific nature they remain impersonal. Petrol stations speak to us about journeys, about the moments in limbo between two points. They are paintings which seem to deal with place, often a familiar but non specific place.
When we sit this realisation next to the romanticised view of paintings function, particular that of abstraction an uncomfortable reality is revealed. Painting is supposed to drag us from reality, to provide an antidote, a fleeting escape towards some utopian abode. It provides transcendence from the bland mundane reality in which we all seem to float. So when Crook presents us, in terms of subject, with what he himself admits is a ‘mundane blandness’, then a contradiction is created. The places he takes us are just those from which we wanted to escape. As such they are uneasy.
The petrol stations, for me, seem to take on a dark melancholy which talks to us about paintings own weakness and wider issues within reality. Painting frustrates in its promise for escape and then its denial of anything tangible. It leaves us in limbo. Pausing our road journey at a petrol station Crook’s work seems to articulate this frustration; lost between two points, never capable of reaching the end point. Beyond these self reflexive narrations of paintings eternal impotence in experience, it seems to resonate with more generalised frustrations. Those metaphorical uncompleted journeys we take, those lost in limbo pauses. The petrol station pieces seem aware of paintings ability to talk, without paradox, about itself and beyond itself. A chatty but silent orator.
What becomes of most interest is the discussion created between this subject matter and the manner in which it is communicated. It is at the root of all meaning in realist painting in particular. The realist tradition never illustrates the humble nature of its subject matter. That is always heroic elevation or unreal shifts. Think of Millet’s peasants, given a Michelangeloesque grandeur in their poses and a warming glow to the skies. Consider Manet’s painterly arrogance and plastic construction which transforms the everyday into the most multifaceted and complex of images. How about Courbet, high priest of the movement? His pedantic realism and Davidian compositional strength give his works a hidden level of artifice which control meaning. More recently we have Hooper’s cinematic lighting and staging of figures which is theatrical in its construction. They all focus on the real but transform it through the choices they make.
The more direct connections to Crook’s work can be seen in the photography of Martin Parr; the obsessive diarist of various nuances of British life. The tea cups, the tourists, the dinner lady, the parking space are all iconic images which sit somewhere between journalism and social realism. Such labelling does him no favours. What is true is that the over saturation, the nature of his framing, the grouping of his images are all devices to focus on the unique aspects of the everyday. The humble becomes profound. Parr’s work does, however, occasionally have the kind of downward looking patronised onlooker feel to it.
Crook’s paintings lack something that is central to many of the above. They are generally figureless. He presents us with a manmade stage upon which no clear narrative drama takes place. It is a similar sense to Michael Raedecker’s seminal works but removing the explicit sense of a pre or post narrative. We are left feeling an unease and incompleteness. They are not as explicit or didactic as any of the above. This elusiveness seems typical of much contemporary painting. It is not a cop out, but a celebration of paintings unique traits. Painting is not designed for the overtly political commentary; it is more poetry than prose.
Formally Crook’s work also opposes many of the previously mentioned. They lack the openly heroic, and serious, nature in colouration. In place of Courbet’s dry formalism and Hooper’s theatrical lighting is pinkness. It’s a tooth rotting sugary pinkness, hanging like a veil over the images. Normality packaged in a pretty glow with a soft lighting which dreamily charms rather than arresting us with drama.
It is our tendency to read such formal content before marrying it to a dialogue with its subject. As such we enter a melody of colouristic games. The pink is the solo player, with little vignettes of yellow, green and blue appearing in various images. In Golden Mile (below) a trams façade glows amidst the mass of pink and blue. Thin washes of various yellows hover over the red base. The colouristic opposition causes an optical vibration, the red looking to push forward and the yellow glimmering above. The play of colours is harmonious and balanced. There is a colouristic pleasure to the works that almost allows us to totally detach ourselves, to be utterly submersed in the beautiful. This is the language and delights of someone who has made and viewed abstract works. Yet the empty and easy escape of some romantic abstract aesthetic is not open to us here. Just as we are about to be totally consumed in the colour we are reminded of content, it re-arrests us.
This disjunction is not evidence of a painter who should be still making pure abstraction. It is the dichotomy between subject and formal content which provides the tension upon which the works succeed. The abstract path was too singular, too monotone and too uncomplicated. Whether art mirrors life or itself it should at least be looking to reflect the contradiction inherent in both.
The contradiction is one created by the inevitable battle a painter has to have when faced with subject matter, rather than the total freedom of abstraction. The total freedom was always a lie anyway, limiting rather than extending our vision. Without a structure to play from or build towards we are lost.
The photographic images and sketches that Crook works from provide this. They give him the script or the sheet music from which to play. The image gives you givens and directions from which you have to make careful decisions. It’s the placing of a line, the shifting of a composition, the construction of a two dimensional shape to allude to a three dimensional space. Painters have been doing it for thousands of years, yet still it fascinates. Nothing much changes.
It is this structure which gives the work the rhythm along which the previous mentioned colour based melody can play. On first glance this rhythm seems classical and solid in its form. The geometry of the architecture, the format of the canvases sets up this presumption. A rectangular field filled with other rectangles which go both across and through the plane, a fluctuation being set up between these two spatial referents of flatness and depth.
A closer inspection reveals a far less rigid construction. They seem capable of falling apart. They appear, as they are, artificially constructed. Shapes which are walls are just shapes. They seem to almost dissolve back into the fluidity of the process from which they emerged. The lie of the illusion is revealed; just as the lie of the aesthetic delight had been denied. Instead we are left hovering between the two.
What we find is a succession of formal contradictions which seem to support many of the most instinctive associations which emerge from the subject matter. The visual sensation of viewing the works for any period becomes akin to the metaphor of being in limbo which both the petrol stations describe and painting specialises in. It brings me back to Keats’ ‘Ode to a Grecian Urn.’ The romantic poet celebrates and laments, in equal measure, the power and weakness of art. The eternally held decisive moment yet the moment that never happens. The lose of transience but the lack of life. In this case the frustrations are of the paintings inability to provide genuine escape, instead offering pretty passages into mirrors of the everyday. When fully digested the vicious inescapable circle of tangible reality, and most particularly its more mundane elements, is an uncomfortable realisation.
These messages seem to be the product of a process which follows Richter’s ideal, ‘before the idea came the deed.’ Its an ideology which looks to find meaning from the work rather than working towards a preconceived agenda and message. Crook is not setting out to impose a belief system upon the viewer, rather the choices made along the way create paintings which have a vocal autonomy.
The metaphysical conversations which emerge from the pink veils of Crook’s paintings are heroic, but not in the sense of being full of grandeur and self importance. It’s a quieter heroism, one which looks to be honest about painting and reality. This honesty is, surely, the best kind of a lie.
