When I came across the work of Monica Cook, I wondered if she might have cracked open a similar fortune cookie, from which would have sprouted this particular body of work.
Quote from the artist found on Atlanta’s Marcia Wood Gallery website:
"I am often carried away with the details, using the paint to describe a near-cruel, sometimes disturbing, objectivity of the figure, heightening various textures on the body, the translucency of the skin, how the veins surface and recede, the subtle sheen of the lips and slickness of the eyes. I love to paint flesh, fascinated by how history is trapped in the skin: the stories told in lines etched into faces, bruises and scars from their past. I find myself heightening the details on and in the flesh, which enhances the mortal presence of the sitter and creates a tension between the psychological complexity of the person and their raw humanness."
Cook points out that the figures in her work “wrestle with debauchery and virtue, control and liberation, logic and absurdity – the beauty and repulsion inherent in each of these extremes and the magnificent struggle in our search for balance.”
We don’t always realize it, yet food is a very intimate thing and the more I think about it the more I see the correlation between food and sex. In these images, the women are indulging in pleasures of the flesh, yet in this case “the flesh” isn’t exclusively human. “Comfort food” is a term used quite frequently to describe what one will consume with the purpose of being soothed. It is a form of self-gratification – perhaps I may even venture in saying it is a form of masturbation. When Monica Cook says “bruises and scars from their past” are visible in the flesh, we are shown that same flesh covered in what can be interpreted as a form of escapism: eroticized food. Fighting flesh with flesh - personally I couldn't envision a better way.
3 comments:
her name is cook.... and you got the quote from wood. coincidence?
food and sex are both awesome... but you shouldnt combine them... horrible yeast infections... and food is always better after the sex.
maybe you should tell that to the couple that had sex on top of a durian
i would... but they are fictional... no one could bone in that smell.
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