MARCUS COPE

Cope’s work as a painter liberates itself from all easy categorisation by presenting himself and us with problems not to solve but to question. Again and again. The image-maker simultaneously as iconoclast, perhaps: not dilettante eclecticism, but a sardonic joy and (at one and the same time) delighted cynicism at the limitless (im)possibilities of painting. Of course he can paint photo-realistically (who couldn’t in any case learn?) Of course he can adapt tropes, seize on motifs, deconstruct the canvas, make a mess. But there's more, there’s always more: with energy, imagination and sly wit each painting thwarts its own outcome (what, Cope might ask, is the point of painting when the result is a foregone conclusion?) Within each canvas there are points at which, the result already apparent he (clearly) takes off at once down some non-signposted path.

Any one of Marcus' paintings will tell you something, but not as much as an array of them will, as the tree becomes a forest of conflicting elements that still cohere: marks that 'mean' something jostling ones that don't, the irregularity of canvases that for practical reasons or out of pure curiosity about the outcome have bits missing or bits attached; two paintings that open up like a window on to a landscape that has disappeared behind a further layer of paint; one painting on the spur of the moment hung overlapping another one. It's no production line here, closer, weirdly, to the MGM image of the crazy artist in a constant fury of self-expression, slashing at the canvas in a ferment while the oily dealer in a suit stacks them up in the van outside; a self-portrait for no discernable reason a bit like Munch's (not in the show); three paintings of vacuum cleaners, the image degrading only slightly over the triptych, a set of 12 large paintings exhibited elsewhere in the shape of a huge M, three up and three down, three up and three down all hinged together; a project for a similar set of paintings stacked like a house of cards (not exhibited anywhere), personal memories that are meant to stay private, some text, cartoonishness, paint splattered, sloshed as well as slashed, dripped, bleeding, recurring motifs (anyone for tennis?), cigarettes not quite like Guston's, nothing, to be honest, quite like anyone else, an attitude only superficially like say Kippenberger if only because Cope is a real painter, only a provocateur to people open to being provoked.

'The 'said' must be torn from the 'not-said', as Barthes put it.

“I know I could be a 'really good' painter and I'm glad I'm not.”

Studio 1.1