A commotion of gestures, stillness of shapes in Nicole Coson’s art

My exhibition is about rocks,” says Nicole Coson of her solo show, “The Process of Elimination,” opening on Wednesday, April 6 at the Tall Gallery of Finale Art File.

Unlike in her previous shows, however, in which the presence of the actual object in the creation of the work is paramount (in a previous exhibit, for instance, wool dipped in ink left its filamentous impression on the paper during the printmaking process), the rocks are merely suggested as ovoid shapes floating on the canvas, reduced to their barest recognizable forms. They would have been entirely abstract if not for the visual reference in the center of the exhibition space: an arrangement of rocks evoking those in a Zen garden but covered in velvet.

For Nicole, the daughter of Tessie Sy-Coson, the interest lies less in depicting the physicality objects make than on their imprints, their resonances, their ghostly equivalents — but still without losing their DNA, the formal structure that determines their irrevocable presence in the natural world. She is also largely curious about their capability for transcendence. In a way, her show grapples with “the uncanny feeling when you begin to see things that are representing something but you really know they are just inanimate objects.”

In “Process of Elimination,” the rocks are merely suggested as ovoid shapes floating on the canvas, reduced to their barest recognizable form.

Such symbolic thinking underscores much of what we know about art, but for Nicole, it’s important how the painting itself creates its own presence in the world, apart from what it may representationally suggest. In her work she offers the viewer two things at once: the reverberation of a thing and its concomitant erosion — the dancing of shadowy fire on the proverbial cave of Plato.

In her monochrome series, what is captured is not shape but energy, the artist’s gesture recorded not in real time — such as in a painting in which the gesture is translated by a loaded brush — but registered by the printmaking surface, which would then be transferred onto canvas. The imprinted gesture only comes to life when she opens the press, revealing swirling cosmoses, looming storms, warping vortices on a canvas bisected by a rectangular negative space, which suggests parallel universes to be beheld at once.

Nicole Coson offers the viewer two things at once: the reverberation of a thing and its concomitant erosion — the dancing of shadowy fire on the proverbial cave of Plato.

What Nicole pursues is not representation itself but the primal impetus behind it, the intentional force that prompts a monk to organize stones in a garden or an artist to spread paint on a canvas and how this energy cleanses our vision, creates surprising and spontaneous arrangements and recalibrates how we see the world. Her works underscore — and disrupt — the compulsion to arrive at meaning, letting perception hover upon that precarious space between presence and absence, between the world that we know and the world that it conceals.

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“The Process of Elimination” runs until April 30. Finale Art File is at Warehouse 17, La Fuerza Compound, 2241 Don Chino Roces Ave. Makati City. For details, visit www.finaleartfile.com.