Artist’s Large Paintings Featured in Exhibition

What do you do with a 6ft x 10ft painting?

If you’re John Cox you create from everything around you and you give your gestures room to breathe, despite their breadth. You fill in life’s blank spaces. You create something that becomes an object in itself, something no one has seen before.

“I’m trying to create new things,” Cox told Arts&Culture, comparing the process by which he creates his large scale works to discovering a naturally formed object like a piece of driftwood on the beach.

“But the thing is it’s not a representation of something else; it’s just an object. It’s an arbitrary object that...is not meant to be representative of something else. It’s supposed to be what it is.”

Cox’s show “Large Paintings” will open officially at the Central Bank on Thursday, Oct. 11.

The show features works from both the artist’s collection and a private collection, created between 1998 and 2004. Cox was offered a space that was available in the gallery’s calendar and thought about how he could give context to his work.

“I thought, well okay, this is a good way for me to screen out works that I’d like to show, and one of the things I guess I have been known for over the last couple of years is making these really, really big paintings,” said Cox.

Then came seven of his gigantic paintings — paintings that you can step into and bathe in their emotions, their expressions. The gallery, with its high ceiling and open balcony, is a great space for works of this size.

“That space works for those paintings because you get to look at them from 20 to 30 feet away, and that’s really when you get to feel how the work comes together,” Cox said.

“The paintings do have a double quality in that you can read them from far and get a sense about them,

and then as you get close to them, you can pick through them and look at little markings.”

At the exhibition, a taped interview in which Cox talks about the challenges of creating and placing large scale works plays on a small television screen near the foot of the stairs in the gallery. The interview plays continuously.

Creating large scale works “comes with a whole other set of situations and challenges and dynamics that sort of seem like a very simple thing,” said Cox. But the “scale of the work does present a unique set of circumstances that you have to deal with.”

The circumstances vary from actually making the works to finding space large enough to accommodate them. Cox said that placing the works, which become like sculptures due to the size, is like working with an architect on the placement of a house on a piece of property.

“I think that there are things that we don’t really pay much attention to. Those kinds of sensibilities come into making works that are large.”

The works, done in house paint, incorporate objects such as fabric, wood, a light bulb, drawing you into the artist’s sphere as much as it opens your own.

Cox said that his influences are as wide as his gestures. “I’m really very influenced by things other than visual art. I’m a big fan of electronic music. I like jazz music. I sort of enjoy even the television; there’s something about the way you can flip through the channels and you can have things going on,” he said, recalling an experience of watching several television screens at once, all airing different events and channeling separate messages that were disparate but oddly cohesive at the same time.

“Most of the times when people aren’t paying attention that’s when I like to pay attention.”

By: THEA RUTHERFORD
The Nassau Guardian

Posted on 01/17/08

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