Ethan Cook
Soup to Nuts
De Brock is pleased to present its fourth solo exhibition with Ethan Cook, taking place at Lempertz during Brussels Art Week. Lempertz is ideally situated between the Sablon and Avenue Louise, in a historic building designed by the Belgian Art Nouveau architect Jules Barbier. Built around 1900, the house features a 200 square meter hall with a ceiling height of nine meters, making it the only large hall of its time to have been preserved in its original form. This magnificent hall has become a popular exhibition venue in the Belgian capital and has hosted exhibitions by Anish Kapoor, Ellsworth Kelly, Sean Scully and Heimo Zobernig among others. This latest exhibition by Ethan Cook takes the anachronistic idiom ‘Soup to Nuts’ as its title, a colloquialism commonly understood to mean ‘(from) beginning to end’ and derived from the description of a traditional full course dinner.
Early on in his artistic career, Cook began experimenting with dying or staining the blank canvas in an attempt to do away with the need for paint or pigment. Aiming to remove the boundary or barrier between artist/audience and the artwork, as well as satisfy his ongoing interest in material existentialism and actuality, he sought to bring a physicality and presence to color and approach the complete act of creation. For, he thought, if the existence of matter or material is the essence of art-making, and an artwork is unable to act as anything other than what it is in actuality, an artistic practice centred around the process of establishing previously non-existent picture planes would leave the canvas itself as the ultimate, and entire, artwork. Therefore, for over a decade now, Cook has developed a painting practice that uniquely doesn’t use paint.
Instead, pre-dyed cotton is hand-woven into lengths of colored canvas on the artist’s specially adapted four-harness floor loom. By employing this conventional craft technique as a means to question contemporary concepts of art and art-making, Cook keeps an eye on the past whilst pursuing artistic innovation and originality. Marrying the tried and tested mechanical process with a performative implementation of the artist’s hand, Cook serves as the loom's sole controller and conductor, deftly directing its myriad moving parts witn the flick of a wrist, the sweep of a palm or the step of a foot. Meditative, repetitive and rhythmic, the process nevertheless throws up the odd inconsistency, erratum or irregularity - a raised thread here, a slub of bundled knots there - accepted and embraced as the unmistakable hallmarks of a hand-loomed canvas.
Having assembled a substantial mass of his base material, Cook then sets about the prolonged period of composition. Previously, the artist has layered elements atop a flat stretcher - adding, rotating, subtracting and arranging until they reach a natural equilibrium - before sewing, stitching together and stretching. However, for this latest body of work, he applies a painter’s approach to the editing process, cutting up these works once more of a further round of alterations. Placed on a fresh canvas, the pieces are repositioned, reorganised and remastered, sometime over weeks of sustained consideration, before a final scarring of the surface with that definitive threaded mark-making. While early minimalist, color-field-compared examples explored the flatness and physicality of the canvas through blocked colors and geometric constructions, the latest body of work approaches abstract expressionism by introducing a vibrant, varied color palette and a vital, diverse vocabulary of shapes. Arranged somewhat alphabetically as if to symbolise indecipherable words or sentences, or perhaps as musical notation (with titles such as Serenade, Harmonies Plain and Severe, and Dancing with the Mysteries), Cook again acts as composer or choreographer, assembling, overlapping and abutting his handmade cotton silhouettes.
Alongside, three new bronzes similarly simplify the creative process, placing that marriage of man and machine at the foreground. Presented with their vents, risers, sprues and support still attached - as if paused at a particular point in the casting - Cook once again celebrates these cornerstone craftsmanship techniques. Embracing their ‘in-progress’ status not only satirises the finely finished and perfectly patinated bronzes one might have come to expect, but also highlights the inherent imperfections of art, artistry and, by extension, the artist himself.
The opening reception will be held in presence of the artist on September 12th from 5 till 9 pm, please email us for more information.
