Press and Editorial
CHARLES COOPER WHAT GOES AROUND...
5/7/2016Bill Gregory
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The theme of my work is the urban roadway where paint notifies and moderates interactions between drivers and pedestrians, or drivers and neighbourhoods. Similar to the notion of the river as a life metaphor, for me the road and its various junctions suggest a rich vein of personal and cultural symbolism. At the same time the painted surfaces invite an aesthetic response to their shapes, patterns and textures. The new series focuses on the roundabout, where drivers intersect with other drivers. CHARLES COOPER
COOPER’S works are meditations upon the ways in which we organize and travel through the urban environment. They encourage us to treat the road as a kind of sculpted object that we can turn over in our hands in order to understand its particular language of expression and to contemplate the ‘patterns’ of human behavior that it generates. His paintings, despite the geometry and solidity of the shapes within them, are always renditions of objects in dissolution. This dissolution locates the
viewer in many places at once, from the road’s surface, to an aerial viewpoint, to the distillation of a map... LAURA FISHER
COOPER allows us to see the extraordinary in the ordinary by bringing alive the aesthetics we live with everyday but seldom notice. The artist built a speed bump in the gallery at a previous show. The new work, focusing on roundabouts may sound mundane, but in the artist’s hands the works take on a dazzling richness and diversity. There is an affinity with Aboriginal art as his works depict place/maps often employing an aerial view and using paint in a reminiscent manner. There has always been continuity in the theme of his work and this is his finest show to date in clarifying his intellectual position and motivating himself emotionally. The ‘style’ has truly reached maturity and the works literally sing.
CHARLES COOPER lives and works in Sydney and teaches at the National Art School. He has had over twenty solo exhibitions since 1977. This is the fifth solo exhibition at Annandale Galleries since 2006. His work is widely represented in public and private collections in Australia and overseas.
» Click here to download PDF
» View CHARLES COOPER WHAT GOES AROUND... exhibition
The theme of my work is the urban roadway where paint notifies and moderates interactions between drivers and pedestrians, or drivers and neighbourhoods. Similar to the notion of the river as a life metaphor, for me the road and its various junctions suggest a rich vein of personal and cultural symbolism. At the same time the painted surfaces invite an aesthetic response to their shapes, patterns and textures. The new series focuses on the roundabout, where drivers intersect with other drivers. CHARLES COOPER
COOPER’S works are meditations upon the ways in which we organize and travel through the urban environment. They encourage us to treat the road as a kind of sculpted object that we can turn over in our hands in order to understand its particular language of expression and to contemplate the ‘patterns’ of human behavior that it generates. His paintings, despite the geometry and solidity of the shapes within them, are always renditions of objects in dissolution. This dissolution locates the
viewer in many places at once, from the road’s surface, to an aerial viewpoint, to the distillation of a map... LAURA FISHER
COOPER allows us to see the extraordinary in the ordinary by bringing alive the aesthetics we live with everyday but seldom notice. The artist built a speed bump in the gallery at a previous show. The new work, focusing on roundabouts may sound mundane, but in the artist’s hands the works take on a dazzling richness and diversity. There is an affinity with Aboriginal art as his works depict place/maps often employing an aerial view and using paint in a reminiscent manner. There has always been continuity in the theme of his work and this is his finest show to date in clarifying his intellectual position and motivating himself emotionally. The ‘style’ has truly reached maturity and the works literally sing.
CHARLES COOPER lives and works in Sydney and teaches at the National Art School. He has had over twenty solo exhibitions since 1977. This is the fifth solo exhibition at Annandale Galleries since 2006. His work is widely represented in public and private collections in Australia and overseas.