Ben Cottrell
Galerie Warhus Rittershaus, Cologne, Germany
On entering the gallery, you rub your eyes and perform multiple double takes: what did I just see? Didn’t that look totally different just now? Ben Cottrell is showing new work in Cologne and, to put it briefly, it’s like an entertaining and intense acid trip where everything which – only moments before – appeared clear and simple suddenly disperses into shapes and colours, blowing up in your face.
Superwoman meets Where the Wild Things Are, Dionysus meets Russ Meyer, with added echoes of bizarre 1960s sci-fi films. With their vacant white eyes, Cottrell’s heroines (for example Portrait of M., all works 2010) look like aliens who take on the form of sirens just to mock those who behold them. But if your attention strays for a second, their facial features scatter into the idyllic landscape: an arm becomes the course of a river, cloud-hung mountains grow out of a forehead, an eye flies through the air. From here, the painter also pursues his chimeras into other media: in his neo-expressionist woodcuts, the coherence of the real takes a plank in the eye; in his loosely wrought pen and ink drawings, he explodes the world into its component parts and puts them through the particle accelerator of art history. The Berlin-based British artist prevents this from becoming mere pastiche: he plays the god of trash who knows exactly what he’s doing – where to put the dynamite, and how to keep the pieces under control as they blow apart. He’s an epic romantic with a far-reaching memory: he moves somewhere between Francis Picabia and Pulp, Francis Bacon and Bernard Buffet, Sturm und Drang.
Even in his painting, he remains far from predictable: at times with a thick patinations and driven by powerful brushstrokes, at others elegant, refined and transparent, applied with precision. These pictures, some presented in old, chipped frames, look as if they hung for many years a sailor’s pub in a port somewhere, and then someone found them and now they’re hanging here. As if they couldn’t care less what the audience does with them. That’s part of the pleasure: they juggle with components that we know; they work with colours that we remember; they pass close to forms that resound in the unconscious.
Whereas a few years ago, it was more likely to be rather undifferentiated portrayals of hobgoblins whose eerie faces briefly emerged from swampy green, now Cottrell has sharpened his weapons: he has recruited the most attractive cast, found the brightest colours, the weirdest angles. And in addition to all this, a huge black sun made of sawn plywood (Rotten Sun), mounted on two freestanding wooden supports running from floor to ceiling, glows and burns, hot and dark, into the gallery space.
Translated by Nicholas Grindell
Magdalena Kröner
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