Candy for Crocodiles

Over in London, Ralf Kokke’s Candy for Crocodiles solo is currently running its final week at Kristin Hjellegjerde gallery. And I feel it’s important to mention the term “pictorial” because the Dutch artist stubbornly uses bold, flat colors and simplified, non-realistic perspectives to emphasize the image as a constructed world rather than a realistic representation.

This world is built on the foundations of his childhood dreams, marked by lush landscapes and filled with real and imagined, hybrid animals. While these scenes initially awed his younger self, over time Kokke became aware of their symbolist potential. So, finding comfort in the innocence of such a ‘world of pure light’, he started using its vocabulary to tackle more serious themes. And thinking of Tick-tock the Crocodile from Peter Pan, Kokke painted a body of work that touches on the ephemerality of life under the relentless shadow of time.

But not interested in straightforward depiction, Kokke developed a technique that moves the image from an exact idea to a more ambiguous painterly form. Such visuals evoke Rousseau’s dreamlike jungle scenes and simplified forms, the symbolic, fantastical imagery, and the distorted forms, thick brushwork, and depictions of bulky, distorted human figures in Flemish Expressionism. With such technique, it’s the physical handling of the material and the purposely unforgiving, coarse surfaces that dictate the final, often imperfect, almost clumsy image. In the end, its meaning emerges from the process itself, as texture, layering, and material qualities shape these symbolic scenes of wonder and mystery. —Saša Bogojev