Nigel Cooke's paintings incorporate elements of reality and fantasy, utilizing the recurring setting of the wall at ground level. This work includes essays by Suhail Malik and Darian Leader and an interview with the artist by Ingvild and Stephan Goetz.
Nigel Cooke’s paintings construct a dark and melancholic world; a deeply psychologised landscape filled with an atmosphere that articulates the trauma of creative dereliction. At its core, Cooke’s work is an allegorical conception of creativity and production, played out in a world populated by artists and philosophers. This is a place haunted by vagrant and degenerate martyrs who have caved-in to a parody of existentialism and committed themselves to experience over abstractions of thought. These characters abandon reason, wilfully and foolishly throwing themselves headlong into the unseen and unknown.
Talking Pictures is the third, central component of a five-part cycle titled Imagination Becomes Reality, produced by the renowned Goetz Collection. Here the focus shifts to contemporary narrative images, less actual "talking pictures", films or videos, than other visual media--paintings, for instance--engaged in an exchange with the viewer. When painting used comprehensible set symbols, compositions, atmospheres or motifs, the work was readable not only individually but also intersubjectively. Nowadays, the question arises as to what visual elements are readable at all. Talking Pictures endeavors to illustrate through the works of Nigel Cooke, Peter Doig, Inka Essenhigh, William Kentridge, Jochen Kuhn, Rosilene Luduvico, Michael Raedecker, Hiroshi Sugito and David Thorpe how pictures, although mute, may also become "talking pictures" that confront the viewer with precise, specific statements. The works included have a lot to tell, and the more profoundly we delve into them, the more we will recognize ourselves in the stories.