The Cosmic Artist

JM Larkin

 The expansive and encompassing qualities of the word cosmos limits using it to categorize one thing to the exclusion of another, and everything really is cosmic in its own way. For an artist to work cosmically is a way of arranging things that values a comprehensive perspective, avoiding any blur in perception that leads to a disregard for preceptable order. The cosmic artist works with variables beyond the tangibility of their medium, and in contrast to the conceptual artist, demonstrates primarily a sense of intimate mystery rather than the visual realization of a specific idea. The result is indefinite association paired with vibrant expressionistic optimism and the freedom to subtly address contemporary worldly concerns without suffering from the pitfalls of narrow observations of the obvious, stirring deep connections with time, space, history, and the nature of materiality. Here are three artists that could be considered to be currently working in a cosmic manner:

Erika Verzutti

Work that is the product of the artist’s summer 2024 residency in Arles makes up the current exhibit Erika Verzutti: The Life of Sculptures at the city’s new(ish) LUMA Tower. Verzutti has filled the gallery with an awareness of time and space outside of the gallery, utilizing direct connections with the archaeological and material histories of France. Her signature venusesque sculptures of bronze fruit stacked vertically address the reality of the passage of time all things endure in their own way; the spoiling of fruit, the aging of bronze, and the changing of artistic style (Venus figures or Brancusian modernism). They are paired with contemporary concerns as they nap on resin encased newspapers, their form shifted from innerly ordered yogic poses towards a structure resembling history’s megaliths, a comment perhaps on the exhaustion of following the news, the preservation of the now, or the artist’s own boredom with her most popular form. A “graveyard” of various bits and pieces from her production at first disregarded placed atop found Arelsian pavers demonstrates the reaestheticising nature of arrangement and context. In sensual wall pieces, the imprints of Verzutti’s fingers are given disarming coloration, an optimistic take on the pleasantries of human environmental impact or the beauty of work.

Jongsook Yoon

Attempts to paint “all-over” have yielded seminal efforts to fully embrace the reality of the medium of paint, but specificity of concept and unattachable regional associations have often deprived paintings the freedom of either being everywhere at once or nowhere at all. With Jongsook Yoon’s paintings, shown recently at Galerie nächst St. Stephan in Vienna, a freedom in approach allows for the merging of space as it is and space as we feel it. They are landscapes in form and expressionistic in execution, coming from both inward and outward at the same time. They show concern for the realities of the landscape and its symbols without succumbing to personalized grievance. Where aggressive brushwork or generalized forms may produce work indicative of the experience of detachment from nature, particularly in an urban world, careful and delicate compositions produced with blazingly comforting colors are depictions of the harmonious results of deep contemplation on time, space, and interaction with material.

Gabriel Orozco

It is not the ability to think differently that produces work of cosmic quality, but the perception of things more completely. Gabriel Orozco has embodied the role of the artist as perceiver and reporter throughout thirty years of work, elucidating perhaps banal moments in ways that show the excitement of the now alongside the comforting persistence of reality. He does not abstract what he sees, but rearranges the deceptively obvious in ways that demonstrate deep consideration for a shifting order. What is best learned from Orozco’s work is the importance of dynamic curiosity in exploring a world where deep examination is rewarded by moments of tangible beauty amidst the challenges of uncertainty. A major retrospective of his work will soon be on display at the Museo Jumex in Mexico City.