New spirit in painting

In this new series of paintings, Nigel Cooke has firmly established himself as the leading British painter of his (post-Doig) generation. He does it through a typically contemporary art sleight of hand — making epic paintings about the end of epic painting.

The name of this 35-year-old, who studied at Goldsmiths and now lives near Canterbury, is unknown to most of the British public but he had a show at Tate Britain back in 2004 and art collectors already queue for years to buy one of his paintings.

He is a great choice for the opening show at the new West End space of Stuart Shave/Modern Art, probably the most successful of the (in this case, former) East End galleries to have emerged in the boom of the past five years. Like many of Shave’s competitors, his taste, often figurative, usually reflecting a sense of craft and a "return to beauty", sometimes suffers from a weakness for the decorative — but not here.

Cooke’s 15-canvas show is small yet it feels much larger. His paintings are intense in their detail and exemplary in their variety — there is more incident and originality in one Cooke painting than there is in the entire oeuvre of many of the previous generation of pop-conceptual British artists, the YBAs.

In large and small canvases and drawings, tramps swigging bottles of liquor stagger across scrubland with dilapidated, graffitied modernist buildings in the background. A strange fog or dusk-like gloom has settled on these strangely picturesque corners of rundown council estates, which recall 18th-century views of classical ruins. We often see it all through arabesques of sperm-like fauna, which seem like fragments from a floral print from Liberty.

What does it all mean? The best clue is in the window of Stumpy’s Diner — a small tourist souvenir painting of an Alpine landscape hangs there. The peaks of the mountains in the picture are echoed by the pointed concrete roof of the modernist café — it’s a tragi-comic gag about how low we have sunk since the age of Romantic painting, when they thought an artist could depict God in the landscape.

Cooke’s pictures, which here are far more intricate and narrative than previous work, are allegories about this idea of the "death of painting". The tramps are symbols for the artist, now a wino, wandering through a post-apocalyptic landscape, drinking, smoking, dipping into a book, occasionally unsurely painting himself, racked by doubt, wondering what to paint next. He is surrounded by "low" art forms and bits of art history — Cooke’s weather-worn concrete walls have the textures of the most seductive abstract paintings; the graffiti-tags scrawled on them have the lyricism of an Expressionist charcoal drawing; weeds, dirt and clumps of grass are painted with Constable’s attention to detail; occasionally rectangles of faded colour float across the picture surface as if they have broken off from a Mondrian.

The painting style is itself part of the subject — overall it draws on popular artforms of graffiti and illustrated children’s books but it also quotes the big "isms". Art that is cynical and doubtful about art — from Damien’s cabinet of his own fag-ends to Maurizio Cattelan’s exhibition of a live donkey to Luc Tuymans’s deliberately weak painting style — is one of the few common denominators of art of the past 15 years. Cooke’s paintings slot right into this movement but his formulation of its mantra in figurative history painting [as symbolic painted stories] is entirely new.

Some say the craze for contemporary art is a short-term speculative bubble fuelled by easy money; others say that art, freed from the strictures of modernism, has entered a new golden age. Nigel Cooke is a bona fide argument for the latter scenario.

At 23-25 Eastcastle Street, W1 (020 7299 7950) until 25 May. Open Thurs-Sat 11am-6pm, admission free.

Nigel Cooke: New Accursed Art Club
Stuart Shave Modern Art
Eastcastle Street, W1W 8DF