ART-XTREME
Artist Joey Cocciardi’s process: Pack up, get lost in the woods and paint traditional landscapes with a modern twist.
If the X Games had a category for art, Joey Cocciardi would be a serious competitor. His work embodies the most exuberant traits of extreme sports: physical grit, a compulsion to conquer the organic obstacles of nature, some personal danger. For his ongoing “Point of Disorientation” series, he hikes into the wilderness carrying a steel box until he is actually lost. Then he fills the box with found branches and leaves, wraps it in metallic Spandex and documents the work with photos. As he finds his way back, he might take with him the nearby trail markers that would lead others to the site, remaking those into new pieces back in the studio.
It’s a unique bit of art-making, original and outrageous, and like extreme sports, heroic and narcissistic at the same time. But it’s a keen set-up for exploring our connections to the environment, the way we experience, interpret and impact it. You have to appreciate the effort, if not the collateral damage.
“The Sunday Painter,” his current show at Gildar Gallery, is less interventionist, although equally demanding and authentic. The work is, at its base, a series of large landscapes, not so far removed from the iconic variety of painting that defines Western art. Cocciardi paints in the “plein air” style of the genre’s masters, trekking deep into the Colorado mountains and using oils to capture the magnificent hills and valleys and the flora and fauna that inhabit it.
He doesn’t, it must be said, get there the easy way or render his scenes with the unaffected awe of, say, revered naturalists such as Thomas Cole or Albert Bierstadt. These paintings start in Cocciardi’s studio, where he covers a 3-foot-by-5-foot canvas in DayGlo bands of color, turning out abstract minglings of fluorescent greens, yellows, reds and blues.
Then he packages them up in wooden crates, straps them to his body and hikes to remote points in the woods. There, he uncrates, sets up easels and applies a black-and-white overlay depicting the surrounding scenery — bushes and blue skies, snow-capped peaks. The work is imprecise, expressionist and full of obvious brush strokes, although it’s representational enough that you get the picture.
Then, of course, he has to haul the final product, both precious and fragile, back to civilization without anything detrimental happening.
It takes a grand effort and that is made clear at Gildar. The works look hand-made and difficult. They are displayed with their crating intact along the sides and with the neon yellow straps that enabled their transportation still attached and dangling from the edges.
They simultaneously honor and question the tradition of Western landscape painting while putting it in art historical terms. Cocciardi leaves small, distinct fields of his original paintings visible in the foreground and while he covers the rest of his canvas with pastoral beauty, you can still see the brilliant colors underneath.
In this way, he draws a clear line from the figurative trends of the 1800s to the to more obscure ideas of modernism. There’s a bit of Frederic Church and Thomas Moran on view, but also Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko. Both old and new stake a claim on this land and hold firm.
The success of this work is in that conflict. Cocciardi employs the past to make art that’s very much of its time and right at home in a Denver gallery that specializes in what’s current. There’s a nowness to it, underscored by the struggles the artist goes though creating it. This is an extreme age, and the painter — young enough to have earned his master’s from Cranbrook Academy of Art just three years ago — is a product of it.
Still, it is not naïve. Cocciardi avoids the didacticism so prevalent in the work of young artists who address the environment by letting viewers decide what his painting implies. Is it art about nature or art about art?
It would be easy to say both. It’s effective as landscape, and you can have it that way. Cocciardi employs his brush with honor; he’s able to make a lovely and dignified pine tree.
But it can’t escape its historical references, nor does it try to. Too much time has passed for us to see a godly charm in these vistas, the way painters did back in the day. We know how art has progressed, and we know the mountains of Colorado are not the pristine havens they once were. Even Cocciardi’s titles, all borrowed from the geological coordinates of their location (for example: “40°41’06.8”N 105°23’16.6”W” ), underscore how every square inch of land is, at least in some way, conquered.
If anything, these objects try too hard not to let you forget their lineage. The pools of DayGlo paint are more vibrant and obvious than they need to be. The works are meant to remain forever in their open crates with those neon straps flailing about, an unnecessary distraction that emphasizes process over the final product. They contain the carcasses of moths who got caught in their stickiness.
This work is obsessed with its own process and, in that way, full of the artist’s ego. Maybe that’s unavoidable when it takes so much trouble to produce.
Plus it goes with the territory. Those X-Gamers aren’t exactly known for their humility. It takes a large sense of self to attempt feats of skill that border on dangerous. We don’t mind that they’re hot-doggers because we understand that swagger is part of their essence. You couldn’t do a triple somersault on a snowboard — or walk into the woods until you are lost — without it.