Greg
Rook
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Greg Rook
We live like this
Contemporary
figurative painters, like many others, find themselves in the congested
territory of searching for a distinct subject matter that has the
breadth and
malleability on which to build a personalised mark making language. For
Greg
Rook, this quest has brought him to the rich imagery of the American
frontier
and Wild West.
Working
with a
variety of mediated photographic sources, ranging from television, the
internet, and film stills, Rook artificially constructs his disquieting
imagery.
His filmic assemblages could remain in the photographic domain as an
artistic statement
and carry relevance, however, his further activity of painting form the
manipulated imagery, forces us to position the work within the lineage
of historic
figurative painting, and thus we have a very different viewing
engagement, and
duration.
With
the work in
the recent exhibition, We live like this,
Rook’s enjoyment of the paint is key. Relishing the historic weight of
'oil on
canvas', with its status, directness and limitations, Rook has not
tried to
objectively illustrate an idea, but instead, has found a number of
idiosyncratic ways in which to emphasize the physicality of the
painting
activity, alongside more descriptive passages. Whether this is
intensified
colour choices in the painting Trophy,
or the piping of impasto oil paint on to the surface (akin to cake
decoration)
in Land grab, or perhaps the leaving
of raw unpainted sections of linen in the work Interior,
these techniques all contribute to partially disrupt the
consistent ‘screen’ of his source imagery.
Traditionally,
painting has been thought of as a window into another world, only
broken
through the modernist era when the objecthood of a painting was
emphasised.
Rook is very much aware of this lineage and has found ways of implying
space,
and yet, strategically disrupting parts of the surface to remind the
viewer of
the artifice of his constructs. Thus, metaphorically, the painting’s
come
across in equal measures as both idealistic and realistic. Their
instinctive
honesty is always undercut by a knowing awareness of the contemporary
environment of their making. Just when we start to believe in an image,
and its
earnest symbolism, Rook’s painting processes bring us back to the
‘here’ and ‘now’
of the room in which we stand and the physicality of paint on canvas.
This
disruption of surface causes us to slow down our viewing engagement, to
look
and look again in a search for answers to our own anxieties and
beliefs. With
the titling of the works such as Trophy,
Dust and ashes, and Hideout, Rook only
intends to guide our
interpretation, allowing ambiguity to remain.
Rook
embraces the
tradition of metaphorical painting, feeling liberated to explore and
quote
filmic and art historical reference points through the filter of his
geographically specific imagery. He utilises the potent symbolic nature
of the
source material as a way to open up a conversation into our current
anthropological position and beliefs. Sourced from TV and film, it is
not difficult
to start seeing common ground with the techniques of film narration,
and with the
cinematographer’s wide screen. However, Rook cleverly sees the power in
the
isolated film still for delivering the required message - much in the
way Cindy
Sherman plays with the viewer’s own subjective interpretations of a
composed
frozen moment.
It
could be said that the themes and images of
the Wild West and early American settlers have become just another
movie genre
- the loner cowboy striving land and
riches. Rook utilises this, encouraging us, through his cut and paste
figures,
to consider whether these are characters ‘acting’ in a film - the canvas as a silver screen. However, we do
not gain insight into the characters and personalities of these
figures. Instead,
they’re deprived of any particular identity. In the paintings High lonesome and Land grab, we witness
male figures dressed as cowboys at work,
performing the manual labour of constructing shelters and fences. This
use of
the metaphor of building, of course, speaks of simplistic frontier
civilisations and the dividing of land, but further to this, it
cleverly runs
parallel to Rook’s own construction of space as a painter, through his
assemblage of source imagery and the multiple layers of paint
application. Rook
acknowledges the common ground between the heroic iconography of the
early
settlers, defining their own identities, and the myth of the artist,
searching
for answers. This is further reinforced through Rook’s choice of raw
brown
linen to paint on, where he is playing with the embryonic relationship
of the
‘ground’ of his painting, and the raw dry landscape of the imagery.
Thus, it’s
perhaps not stretching the imagination to see the figure in High
lonesome as Rook, the painter,
making his presence and position felt within the terrain of
contemporary
painting.
James
Brooks
brookscottjames@hotmail.com
Written on the occasion of the exhibition We live like this at Lounge
Gallery, London, February 2007.