Alan Cote: Recent Painting Alan Cote's painting has forged into new territory in the last fifteen years: a radical exploration of the possibilities of the large two-panel work in which the two panels complement and yet oppose one another, creating a dynamic dialogue in which the viewer is both witness and participant. |
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A startling change is created when a work is no longer contained on one panel but evolves on two separate but equal panels. The change is visible in the apparent disjunction or disjunctiveness of the painting; in the simultaneous relation and (apparent) lack of relation between the two panels; in the evident concord and discord of the panels. But it is also experienced in the reaction of the viewer, who is no longer in a face-to-face confrontation with a single panel but becomes a third party, a witness to the confrontation between the visual events in the two panels. The viewer is no longer the mere contemplative who is in turn contemplated by the canvas, but the observer who is at the same time the synthesizer, the maker.
Cote begins by laying down two different grounds on the two panels. The grounds themselves may change and evolve until they arrive at a good working relationship. Then the figures are laid down, and they too begin to evolve. One panel will determine the development of the other, and as the other develops, it in turn affects the first, so that the dialogue which exists in the finished painting has an earlier form in the reciprocal interplay that determined the very evolution of the painting: Cote's quest, as the painting progresses, is to discover how one panel needs the other, how the two will finally interrelate and discover a new equilibrium.
Although Cote's paintings evolve from drawings and initial visual ideas, these are no more than a starting point. He takes something that interests him—a color, a drawing, a visual idea—and works with it, first, to a known destination. From the known destination, which is reached fairly early in the process, the painting continues to evolve into unknown territory, sometimes retaining a close relationship to its initial conception, sometimes travelling far from it. Something happens that changes what Cote thought was going to happen. Each painting is made in a different way.
Although there is an implied precision of line in the delineation of the shapes, the edges are never drawn with the mechanical help and absolute precision of a straight-edge or guide. Rather, the minute variations, the slight roughness, of the edge drawn freehand is an important sign of the passage of the human hand over the canvas, and moves the painting away from the coolness of mechanical precision into the warmth of human fallibility. In the same way, the ghost trace of an earlier painted-over brush-stroke allows us to witness the second thoughts of the painter, the dynamics of his thinking, and the work as it evolves, thereby giving us a twofold excitement: the larger effect of the finished work and the more intimate view of the work as it progresses into its finished state.
The colors are often vibrant and strong, bright and forceful. During dark times as well as good times, the mood of the paintings has continued to be generally positive and optimistic, even on occasion sunny or celebratory: Cote is not attempting to react to, or depict, the mood of the month or the year, the season or the day in which he is creating the work. With his more deeply positive impetus he addresses, not the immediate climates and events of our larger community, but something beyond this year and this decade, something that preexists hard or chaotic times and continues after them.
The very scale of the paintings reinforces the impression of expansiveness and optimism. The paintings are for the most part physically larger than the viewer, on a scale so large that the viewer must relate physically to them, physically enter their world, even be subsumed by them, without losing the intimacy of their relationship to them.
Against grounds of strong declarative colors applied neither very thickly nor very thinly, geometric or organic shapes float, entirely contained within the panel, or stretch off the edge, move in a stream up or down the canvas, create optical shimmer or sensuous calm. Bands of color may disappear into the space beyond the outer edge of the canvas, implying a continuation into this vast space, or they may disappear into the space between the panels, where, like the "black hole" in celestial space, the edge defines a region of infinitely concentrated magnetic or gravitational attraction.
A panel of curved bands, for instance, may move up or down the canvas, but in either direction the bands move off the canvas and in so doing imply a larger form that becomes, beyond the canvas and in the mind of the viewer, a planetary form moving through a potentially infinite interplanetary space.
A right panel may have a ground that recedes farther back than the ground on the left panel and appears to move behind the ground on the left panel.
A right panel may have a infinite bands moving up and down off the canvas while a left panel completely contains trapezoidal or pentagonal shapes that appear to collide with the edges of the canvas and float back across it, so that there is one kind of activity on the left and another sort on the right.
Or bands on the right panel may create an illusion of convexity while bands on the left create an illusion of concavity, and where these bands come close together, nearly meeting at the inner edges of the panels, an extreme tension is created, as the lines of one panel contradict the space of the other panel and at the same time, vanishing into the space between the inner edges, create an equilibrium or balance through their mutual opposition.
Cote has often, therefore, chosen to depict shapes that appear to form a section, sector or segment of a much larger implied image that continues to either side or behind and beyond the actual canvas, thereby making use of a much larger fictional canvas and in fact an infinite space expanding behind and beyond the actual canvas.
In Cote's recent painting there is more freedom, more latitude for change than there was in his past work. During the period of his 1970's diagonal bar paintings, Cote was still generally painting on a single canvas, sometimes a shaped canvas, but more often a large rectangular canvas. While he sometimes worked on two panels, these two formed a single entity. He worked more systematically from a dimensional drawing to a gouache color study to the finished acrylic canvas. Colors changed or shifted in tone or value but the finished painting was close to the initial conception. Moving away from the more preconceived paintings, Cote began painting organically against a ground on a single panel, and, beginning in 1984, made an abrupt break from the single panel.
One constant in Cote's painting, however has been his choice of a personal language of abstraction. During an extended period in which figurative painting has become increasingly popular, Cote has resolutely continued to develop his ideas using the enormous freedom offered by abstraction, which connects with the viewer at a subconscious or subliminal place in the mind and emotions, and thus has a powerful effect which is not limited by the web of associations inevitably tied to a recognizable figurative image.
As the viewer observes two panels, eyes and attention are drawn now to the left, now to the right, and a new sort of implied activity emerges around and behind the two canvases and including the two canvases, a sort of ever-changing or ever fluctuating synthesis. And it is perhaps with this synthesis that the viewer engages in his or her own dialogue.
Beyond the activity already present in the relationship between the panels, and the relationship between panels and viewer, is the dynamic relationship between the paintings and their titles. For Cote, the titles of his recent paintings are not descriptive labels, they are not tags delimiting a painting's possible identity, but pieces of text whose form interacts with the form of the painting to create yet another dynamic and similar entity in the mind of the viewer. It is in the mind of the viewer, each in his or her own way, that the form of the text will relate to the painting.
Thus, Cote's two-panel paintings allow the viewer an active, dynamic response to the work, since he or she is implicated in its creation, fashioning particular, responsive interrelation between the two panels, between the panels and the space around them, and between the form of the text and the form of the painting.
Lydia Davis