Nigel Cooke is an interesting guy. Rosen’s press releases just proclaim his cleverness rather than explaining it, but in this interview from Flash Art, he explains his painting a bit. Prompted by the interviewer about Star Wars and the decay it depicts, he manages to take the question to a fascinating place after the jump, along with more work:
I remember the beaten-up, exhausted quality of the first Star Wars film very well. The details of wretchedness have a kind of pathos and idiocy that always shows you who the good guys are. It’s the entropy thing again — there’s a fight to keep the powers of dissolution, or evil, at bay. When the truth of nature leaks into the immaculate spaces of science fiction, it’s an immediate sign of struggle against a higher threat. Nature and its terminal effects gets bound up with a symbolic evil, preying only on the honest mortals toiling amongst it. There is a psychic weight then, yes — something like the irreversibility of time captured in the image of effluvia leaking suspiciously from a crack in a wall. But as a consequence, it’s also a sign of instability or change. In terms of painting, these images may have a similar effect. The duality of decay and disrepair is meant to make the thing look ready with possibilities without too much positivity or salvation. But as well as this, it also returns paint to what it really is, that is, colored mud. To use it to depict exactly that seems like a nice tautology.
