Tactile Imagery

MANILA, Philippines – It has been an electric couple of days for Nicole Coson, breezing through Tokyo’s flashing neon lights and screens, wading and ultimately drowning in its pulsating electric energy.

And in its stillness, the landscape of The Ryoanji Garden of Kyoto was a calming embrace, lifting Coson up to the surface. Reflecting a tradition of conjecture — such as a mother tiger carrying baby cubs across the river, islands between the sea — the dry garden was not only a marvel of skill and craftsmanship.

“Just sitting there, it was such a cathartic feeling and until now, has never really left me,” Coson says, looking back. Following her exploration of captured phantoms and flash constructions since she dabbled into analogue printmaking methods and techniques as a London-based artist in 2013, in “Process of Elimination,” Coson builds upon the way impressions like a state of Zen meditation, whether in Kyoto or not, develop in the mind.

Coson combines printmaking and painting to recompose rock arrangements — creating impressions of stone and sand, rock arrangements and dry landscape gardens — through a breakdown of elements, down to their very essence, studying the elusive mystery of the Zen garden. Mirrorstones and sandstones are just rocks, afterall, but when assembled the way they are in rock gardens, why do they suddenly inspire meditation?

“Process of Elimination,” a solo exhibition and her second show at the Tall Gallery of Finale Art File, can be visually divided into an ultramarine-specked display of stones and an abstract black-and-white depiction of their energies.

The former shows the tactile roughness of stones and their compact shape when held in our hands. Coson executed this through stencils representing rocks and stones in varying shapes and mass, spraying them while they’re lying on the canvas. She takes the stencil off and then presses them onto another canvas, so there are positives and negatives, using different ways to mimic the essence of the rock: is it its texture, hardness or shape?

“I divided each element, arranging the rocks in different ways and trying to mimic the surface with stone spray — a spray paint which mimics the texture of stones,” she explains.

 “I’m trying to single out just the arrangement. When we look at rock gardens, it’s not so much about the rocks, but how they become a tool for meditation when arranged.”

They are accented with ultramarine, a shade of blue Coson has always worked with that is also the name of a rock. The color of the rock of the same name, however, is nothing like the vibrant blue-violet synthetic color.

This series will be complemented by a rock garden assembled in the center of the Tall Gallery, each rock covered in ultramarine-colored velvet, a material with a snugness that can fit each rock’s shape and form.

It reflects Coson’s fascination with rocks she had at her home growing up, displayed on a wooden pedestal. “They’re just rocks, essentially hollow, but for thousands of years, they have been known to hold so much value based on how porous, thin and asymmetric they are,” Coson offers, pointing out qualities otherwise signifying material weakness but which also makes them ornamental.

As for the black-and-white series, Coson clarifies they are maps, her visualization of the energies that hover and flow between rocks in space. Coson carries on with the suggestion of movement, capturing energies caught mid-flight, an integral element in Coson’s work. In her last two shows in 2015, “Ghost” in Rome, Italy and “How to Appear without a Trace” in London, Coson worked at capturing the energies of the metaphysical in canvas by mimicking it.

“Those last (exhibitions) were uncanny, and I transferred this uncanniness to the presence in the dry garden. It is quite difficult to capture, but it’s what I am trying to evoke,” she says.

Coson paints onto a sheet of metal and transfers it onto a surface like canvas or paper, and puts it through an etching press. “The sheet acts like an etching plate except I don’t etch into it. There are no acids involved so I kind of just wipe away, especially for the monochrome ones, and put them through one of London’s largest etch presses which is 3,000 pounds of pressure per square inch,” she elaborates.

Coson reiterates that “Process of Elimination” is a study, her attempt at understanding as she distills texture and arrangement, energy and flow, down to its very essence; it does not provide answers, asking not why, but only how. True enough, tranquility radiates from the canvas.

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“Process of Elimination” is on view from April 6 to 31 at Finale Art File, Warehouse 17, La Fuerza Compound, 2241 Chino Roces Avenue, Makati. Gallery hours are from Monday to Saturday, 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. www.finaleartfile.com.