Carl's

“Pop showed us that there was a lot more subject matter around than we were paying attention to”, Robert Cottingham once remarked. During his rambles about town, he mainly takes pictures of the ad signs which, high above the city-dwellers’ heads, vie for their attention and whose messages appear to compete with one another through their garish colours and legends. The signs cluttering the big cities tell countless stories about the people living there, their attitudes to the brave new world of consumer goods and the ways in which public space is appropriated by private interests. It is certainly no accident that for a long time these colourful neon-signs were considered a prototypical feature of the American metropolis and the American Way of Life. Cottingham’s paintings are thought through down to the smallest detail: They are much more than just one-to-one translations from photograph onto canvas: what we see are carefully chosen and staged details in which the various typographies and colours are finely attuned to one another. Before he turned to art, Cottingham made a living as a commercial artist. In contrast, however, to the serial production of commercial imagery, his pictures are all painted by hand. The details are especially important to him: thus Cottingham never uses adhesive tape to delimitate colour fields: though this would make his work easier he insists on painting without resorting to any mechanical means in order to emphasize the sensuous quality resulting from pure craftsmanship.