Cole Swanson
Lithic Life

[En anglais]

In Cole Swanson’s Lithic Life, ochres, iron reds, and chalky whites diffract our conception of landscape into a chromatic re-envisioning of our relationship with the soil, memory, and presence. From Kandinsky’s synesthetic aspirations to Klee’s pedagogical poetics and, earlier, the Fauves’ insistence that colour could reach deep past the appearance of surfaces, art history has long treated pigment as a passive vehicle through which artistic genius is manifested: gradation as sensation, hue as mood, timber as symbolic emblem. The works gathered across the space in Swanson’s mid-career survey ask us to overcome that fictitious separation.

Here, pigment is not the means by which an image is manifested but the image’s core, the sum of its geological identities and the distillation of its ethical elementality. In its boldness, the exhibition’s title is explicit about this: Swanson frames “lithic life” as more than a metaphor, as it describes a relationship of more than twenty years with mineral pigments that has taught him that earth is “not dead matter but quite lively,” and that the work itself has gradually insisted on disrupting the divide between the living and the non-living.