by David James
See Tucson native Robert D. Cocke’s timely paintings in the current gorgeous exhibition “In Their Nature” at Etherton Gallery, 135 South Sixth Avenue B, featured through June 2. For more information, visit the website at: https://www.artsy.net/show/etherton-gallery-in-their-nature-jim-waid-robert-d-cocke-craig-cully-and-andy-burgess.
Cocke, a long time ASU Professor of Painting, now focuses full time on his work in his Arizona and Michigan studios. It is a serenely challenging collection of paintings with a vision that both attracts and repels, offers but never forces. The show is curated beautifully and can sear the soul. Thrashing at times, hopeful amidst a very certain melancholy – these paintings deliver.
A curious combination of energies collide in these canvases. Threatening, alluring, suggestive, (but of what?) this work somehow manages to convey an amazed, somewhat broken kind of love for all things alive and many things imagined, remembered or dreamed of. Things regenerating and things fading away, celebrations of space, plants, landscapes. Forlorn monuments or tableaus contrast in scale with figures, distant cities, and fields. These figures often seem forsaken -left with remnants of other’s human activity, often under an endless above-ness of sky. Cocke’s terms, spaces and worlds suggest that something may not be quite right with our planet, yet he offers no guarantee of healing in the pictures. It is a parallel to what we often experience in our own lives, uncertainty in healing.
It is hard to breathe when you look at parts of these pictures. That is exactly the point. They repeatedly hint at post-industrial overload bordering on the insane. Cocke offers a tender brand of sadness amid a nearly terrifying resignation. The grace in this work redeems if we have the time to reflect. Cocke, a lifetime observer of Arizona skies, frees us with his heavens and it is often transformative. It is his skies that relieve and finally affirm our basic human uprightness. That satisfies.
However briefly one may unplug to see this show and only according to our capabilities and willingness to engage does Cocke offer us access to his and thus, our own collective sacred spaces. A respite exists if we will stop, look, listen. Cocke meets us halfway. He knows that most of us won’t actually go “there.” He presents the opportunity mercifully however, and that is what makes this exhibition so worthy.
David James is an MFA graduate of the University of Arizona in Painting/Mixed Media 1984. He taught drawing and painting at the University of Montana for 25 years and has recently relocated to Vail, AZ.
