ADAM'S IMPORTANT IRISH ART 28th May 2025

26 15 BARRIE COOKE HRHA (1931-2014) Nude with White (1985) Oil on canvas, 96.5 x 96.5cm (38 x 38”) Signed, inscribed and dated (19)’85 verso Provenance: with Hendriks Gallery, Dublin, label verso € 6,000 - 8,000 Partly on the basis of his exploration of the work of Paul Cézanne, the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Pon- ty argued that seeing is essentially an embodied rather than a detached, analytical process, something that comes decisively into play in both making and looking at paintings. Barrie Cooke clearly needed no per- suading on that score: his work is always imbued with the startling vitality and nervous intensity of seeing in that heightened, embodied sense. His immersive engagement with the subject is transmitted directly, almost electrically, in gesture and colour, line and tone, by-passing conventional ideas of representation. Al- though a conventionally gifted painter, he is pretty much indifferent to habitual pictorial conventions, aiming for a truer account of the experience of seeing - as indeed was Cézanne. Cooke’s subject matter encompasses nature, landscape, the human figure - as here - and the portrait. Water or, more accurately, a sense of flowing water, is ubiquitous to everything he did. He built up his paintings with extremely fast, fluid glazes of oil colour, incorporating drips and visible brushstrokes, with occasional passages of thicker, more opaque pigment, here chiefly in the tre- mendously tactile, even luxuriant ground on which the figure rests. He more or less eschews detail, once com- menting that, in his method of painting, the brushstroke was the detail, but still brilliantly captures the physical reality of the body’s structure, its musculature, sinews and joints, its masses, and especially its energy. Born in Cheshire before his family moved to the US, Cooke initially studied biological sciences before switching to art. On a post-university visit to the UK, his passion for fishing led him to Ireland, and before long he settled in Co Clare, then Co Kilkenny and latterly in Co Sligo. Always close to the natural world, he was alert to ominous environmental problems early on and much of his work reflects not only the beauty but also the prob- lems of environmental degradation. Working trips to Borneo, in the mid-1970s and later on New Zealand were important for his artistic development. He exhibited regularly from the early 1960s at the Hendriks and later the Kerlin galleries, and there were many survey and retrospective exhibitions, including at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, IMMA, The Model, Sligo, the Butler Gallery, Kilkenny and the Haags Gemeentemuseum. Aidan Dunne, April 2025