Exhibition text by writer Matthew Holman to accompany 2025 group show Auguries of Innocence at Cedric Bardawil, London.
10 January - 8th February 2025
Marcus Cope’s paintings are interested in the depths, dregs, and recesses of memory. In Digging in the Past (2024), we find ourselves in a fantastical landscape with defines strata of colours in the sky, as though a rainbow has etched itself into the geological time of a tree trunk, as a desperate figure, crouches ankle-deep in a ravine. He is digging, one assumes, for some kind of treasure, or something lost and perhaps to be regained, in time. Once one alights on a possible narrative explanation for the work, though, we are dragged back into someplace else: on the surface of the picture is a giant globule of rainwater or perhaps a single tear, which overlays the landscape with a profound sense of pathos. A century after Andre Breton signed off the Surrealist Manifesto, Cope is excavating newly realised surrealist worlds of subconscious desire and repressed memory.
