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Text for The Anomie Review of Contemporary British Painting 3, an anthology featuring eighty-five contemporary painters born or living in Britain, selected by Matt Price and edited by Anneka French.

SILVER LININGS

Peer, London

29th April - 11th June 2022

 

For his first solo exhibition in a public institution, at Peer, London, Marcus Cope (b. 1980, Bath) showcased seven of his large paintings alongside two of his small oils on paper. This jolt in scale added to the feeling of unease evoked by the ensemble in general, echoing the voyeuristic and surrealist element in many of his works, whereby fragmented images are seen within the outlines of others, such as the flame of a match in They Told Me You Thought You Were a Mermaid. We Should Have a Cigarette and Talk About It (2021). Cope, who is based in London, has said of his work that it begins, among other things, with recollections of conflict in his childhood (his father was an abusive alcoholic) and examines, in particular, the unreliability of memory. Silver Linings are as maybe; this is certainly the stuff of nightmares.

 

In In the Blackness of the Night (2022) the nightmare is literal, as some monstrous and unidentifiable shape bears down on a tangle of flailing limbs, kicking out from beneath the bedsheets. There are more arms than can be accounted for, with one reaching from beneath the mattress, through which a pair of disembodied eyes and a mouth also appear. The wallpaper is patterned with a motif of two people, one holding the other in a headlock, and one pair is creepily coming to life, stepping off the paper in front of the bedside lamp. Pictures hang on the wall, which could be baby photos, except they have turned mutant: one with a grotesque Cabbage-Patch-doll head, the other with a Hallowe’en pumpkin in its place. The curtains depict clouds or rough waves at sea, a common motif in Cope’s work, as is the fire, blazing within the attackers shape. The work is made on course-grain jute rather than canvas, the rougher weave showing through, and, along with the splattered paint across the surface, this adds to the overall frenzy. As Martin Herbert writes, in his essay to accompany the exhibition, the painting ‘crystallise(s) trauma in a single image’.

 

The title The Dance in Elephant (2021) is clearly tongue in cheek, as the steps being taken by the two depicted figures are those of a duel, not a jig. Cordoned in by the outline of a climbing frame and surreal floating ribbons, and set against the dystopian SE1 backdrop of a dark and ominous multi-storey car park, hoardings, and another fire (with a figure at its core), the protagonists pack their punches until the head of the one on the right, on close inspection wearing a gas mask, explodes, mushrooming into a fine white powder, which could reference cocaine but equally snow (since the ground, upon which mismatched shadows fall, is also white). There is all the violence of a Francis Bacon; Freud would have a field day analysing Cope’s images of human cruelty and psychological torture at their worst.

 

Anna McNay

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© Marcus Cope, 2017

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