This Friday night be sure to get along to the Darkhorse Experiment and support good mate and an amazing artist Craig Cole from the iconic Blender studios.

Craig Cole’s work is something you really need to see up close to appreciate how talented this guys craft really is, the oil paints tend to give it certain depth.

Concreter by day and a father to two amazing kids, its astounding he is able to find time to turn out these incredibly detailed works of art, considering the last time I saw him he had only three hours sleep.

Extract from event page.

Dark Horse Experiment presents:
“STUDIO”
A solo show by Craig Cole

“Painting speaks of a certain alchemy, a visual alchemy that transforms the world into the semblance of a painted surface. This making of alchemy is an inexhaustible task, being repeated and continuously renewed, it is an attempt to create a painting, to make it essential to the world. With our reality now embedded in the lives of images, painting amidst this purview, establishes a relationship to a pictorial and visual paradigm. For painting, what is needed is always established in the visual, as painting is borne from a visual logic. It is a logic that begins from a simple premise – what should I paint? What should be painted?

These underlying questions remain ever present in the works of Craig Cole. He is an artist who finds conviction in painting. In his latest body of work, Cole looks at subject matter that is close to hand, the mundane objects and settings that are immediate to the environment of the studio. As an artist he chooses not to stray far.

It is in the everyday detritus that litters the studio that the banal and mundane is affirmed and the making of the visual arises. The idiosyncrasy of Cole’s visual formulations presents us with paintings that are both tactile and optical. Whether an inconspicuous scene that captures little more than a corner of the studio, or a found object serendipitously placed, Cole’s paintings confound our sense of space whilst carefully conveying an objects materiality. He works his paintings in a manner of realism that is formally astute. Often using multiple edges of the picture plane as the paintings internal armature. As these studio paintings can attest, we encounter moments – the backdrop of sprawling graffiti or the rendering of a brick wall – were we momentarily lose sight of what is inside the frame of the painting and what exists outside. The requisite is in finding the edge. As a painter then, Cole brings us to a paintings limits, by making a visual alchemy that hinges between semblance and artifice, of the real and unreal, which is the place of the studio.”
-Keith Wong

Who: Craig Cole.

What: Studio.

Where: Darkhorse Experiment, 110 Franklin Street Melbourne, 3000

When: This Friday 14th October from 6pm

Facebook event here