 | | Catalogue Text
JAMES COCHRAN
CITY SOULS
Boutwell Draper Gallery, Sydney
Nov 19 - Dec 13 2008
James Cochran's art combines a unique approach to the technique of painting with a perceptive and articulate view of his world. Cochran analyses life on the streets of Melbourne, Paris and Tokyo. He shows us passersby, individuals who we might not notice when we are walking, but who are captured here with photographic candour for our extended contemplation. These ordinary, anonymous individuals - commuters, travellers and the homeless underclass, who could be our neighbours or even ourselves - are dispassionately observed as they go about their business.
The clinical, one-point perspective of Cochran's cityscapes emphasises the coldness that lies just beneath the glitzy surface and the geometric inevitability of contemporary life. Cochran's work reaches out beyond the canvas to pull us into the frame, challenging the averted gaze of our disengagement. In some works he depicts himself, his auto-portraits emphasising both the interchangeability of his characters, and thus a personal search for identity, and the authenticity of his own experience. In his meandering, he is both the acute observer of city life, and the subject of his own investigations, a personality on view like any other.
In developing this body of work, Cochran refers to the idea of les âmes esseulées - lonely or abandoned souls - derived from the song À la faveur de l'Automne by French song writer Tété. In just a few melting dashes of paint, Cochran distils the essence, or soul, of each figure he records. Indeed, in some works, ghostly, insubstantial figures rendered in pale violet can be seen shadowing the pedestrians. Even the omnipresent trees, highlighted in a striking green or violet in the dark of night, possess characters of their own. The solitary walker seems lost in a labyrinth of alien buildings, penetrating car headlights and phantoms.
Cochran's imagery is constructed from a complex of blobs and dribbles of differing colours that coalesce into a spectacular and resonant whole. The finish looks gestural, hastily executed and expressionistic, but it is very carefully planned, indeed virtuosic in its realisation. His subject matter is grounded in realism, but his use of light, especially in the nightscapes, generates a powerful romanticism. Instead of using oil paint applied with a brush, Cochran has adapted nineteenth century French painter Georges Seurat's revolutionary technique of pointillisme by using squirts of aerosol enamel more commonly associated with illicit street art. His unique, abstract surface discloses its imagery only at a calculated distance from the canvas, a distance at which intimacy with the paint gives way to a prospective intimacy with the folk who populate his streets. By analogy, we are only able to see clearly, and to understand, from a distance. But tellingly, as we approach the canvas, these fugitive characters vanish into a welter of coloured marks, as if they were never more than projections of our imagination.
The simplicity and directness of Cochran's images, allied with his extraordinary painting style, gives these works their immense power, locating both subject and viewer in a potent psychological space. We must engage with art that emerges so forcefully from the very street itself.
Chris Reid
October 2008
Chris Reid is a freelance writer, based in Melbourne, who writes on contemporary art and music.
Click here to view the exhibition online
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