Jose Cobo: New Works
at Lyons-Weir & Ginsberg,
The two painted bronze figures standing side by side in Man and Woman in a Cabinet recall Renaissance paintings of Adam and Eve, but displayed behind the glass panels of a wooden cabinet, they’re also like knickknacks in a bourgeois home, decorative objects defused of any iconic power. Yet like the satyrs, the man and woman retain a certain odd edge: with their nude rough skin they have none of the empty prettiness of a commemorative plate. Nor can they be visually integrated with the cabinet, any more than the satyrs can be with their rectilinear wheeled bases. It seems entirely possible that one viewer might feel the atavistic power of myth in these two works while another thinks of issues of commodification and display.
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Another way of describing Cobo’s contradictions is to say that he juxtaposes a self-reflexive, postmodern presentation–placing fine art in a cabinet, satyrs on wheeled carts–with a predisposition toward the “primitive.” Like Redon’s wonderful evolution-inspired drawings of strange half-human beasts, Cobo’s figures include creatures of his own invention. But his theme is often less evolution than devolution: by seeking out the primitive in the human, Cobo seems to suggest we’re regressing. The painted aluminum monkeys on a shelf in Evolution seem to be developing from left to right, from walking on all fours to walking erect to one carrying another on its back. But at the end we see two monkeys lying in pieces, limbs severed. The suggestion is that the last pair fell to the ground and fell apart–that our race’s ancestors failed to make the next step.
Three related human figures suggest an array of possibilities. In Running Forwards a small figure perched on one foot appears to be advancing, while the man in Running Backwards appears to be retreating. Cobo says that these two together assert that “we have to be very active, no matter what we believe. Even if somebody may defend going backward in time, he still has to run in order to impose that idea.” The effect of the two sculptures together is to assert that neither direction is better than the other. In a third, Other Man, the figure is stationary, seemingly contradicting Cobo’s own statement by suggesting that static introspection is also possible. For Cobo, man, woman, human, beast–all are legitimate poles. But his point is not to integrate them, to produce an expansive view of human possibilities, but to juxtapose them in disturbing ways, suggesting that in the end he really doesn’t know what to make of the world’s vast array of choices. Just when you think you’ve “gotten” one of his works, a peek between the legs destabilizes your interpretation and your vision.
After high school Wilkes worked briefly as an art-class model, “just as a job,” an experience that, together with her childhood interest in insects, perhaps influenced these paintings. There she “started getting the itch to draw again”: listening to the teachers’ instructions, she says, “I could feel myself drawing in the shape of my form. Once I did start doing figure drawing it felt very sculptural to me, and I sort of attribute that to being on the other side of it as a three-dimensional being.” Yet she copied the figures in these works from fashion magazines and old movie posters.
