Ethan Cook - Cut Outs, 2021

Releasing 09/08/2021

Aliso Editions is pleased to announce Cut Outs, a series of twenty unique wall reliefs, each hand-painted by the artist.

The title of the edition refers to the process of it’s making. As publishers we saw this collaboration as an opportunity to honor and make visible the way Ethan works and sees. It was by paying attention to the tactile details of Ethan’s working process - putting the ‘how’ he works ahead of the ‘what’ he's made previously - that guided us in our approach to this edition. Beginning with shapes cut from the same handmade paper used for 2-D works on display at his most recent show at Nino Mier Gallery in Los Angeles, Ethan arranged and rearranged these paper shapes in his studio to arrive at the final combination of forms. Now fixed, remade in aluminum and ash wood, and painted, these shapes are the sole repeated constant across the edition. In keeping with the core of his primary painting practice, these hand-painted shapes (and their combinations) were set up as a structure for Ethan to play with form and color, resulting in 20 unique objects that we are extremely proud to publish.

Ethan Cook is an avid and constant reader. In retrospect, we believe it was a discussion of literature, not visual art, that persuaded him to work with us initially. Although many books were talked about and traded throughout the making of Cut Outs, a central piece of writing to the project was Eye and Mind by Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In this essay Merleau-Ponty examines the contention that art - specifically painting - is evidence of vision as a dynamic, interactive process of bodily perception that merges subject and object; as an art-object is made visible through the hands of the painter, the object simultaneously unveils itself to him. More simply, as the object makes itself known to the painter, the painter himself is made visible by the object, meaning that art-making is not a perceptual one-way street, but a simultaneous interaction between seeing and being seen. In painting, vision and action are indivisible.

It is curious to observe that Cook’s work has little to do with conventional ideas of weaving and much to do with a sense of process in abstract painting, especially in Merleau-Ponty’s line of thinking. Weaving - the placement of above and below lines of thread to create a fabric - is traditionally a pre-planned process to produce a fixed design. Ethan, by contrast, starts a piece by placing woven bolts of color loosely in a set space, then arranges and rearranges the composition by adding and subtracting shapes and colors until their interaction creates an asymmetrical balance in which swaths of fabric become forms that can been seen as both figure and ground simultaneously. The final result is a situation in which initially separate cut forms double both as bodies and the perceptual space between them. Built through movement and based on a freedom to change, these considerations of form, color, and proportion become relationships: his finished work is always a surprise.

This is a painting language which this edition of unique works hopes to elucidate.

For more information please contact Saskia Bailey at saskia@alisoeditions.com