She came from Australia to Paris ten years ago. She does big drawings in charcoal, ink and wash. At first they were of large faces, faces without any resemblance to a particular person, not in the least imaginable as portraits – just anonymous faces that look out at you looking, so that you are turned back, reminded of your own gaze. Sometimes the expressions are more legible, with something of the rigidity of Egyptain faces. Sometimes there is no gaze at all, because the head is turned away and seen from the back: it is the back of a skull that confronts you, a bit like the skull of a statue in the shadows.
The work does not conceal its construction: one can clearly see where the wash has run, or the gestures of the artist with the charcoal, the way she has filled up the surface in dirtying it. At the same time it is obviously not this ‘making’ which is what is meant to be seen. Melissa Coote is not showing us ‘her’ art. We remain curious, hovering between these two refusals: the refusal of a subject, the refusal of ‘artistic’ expressiveness. It’s not the image of the artist within her work that orients us: she is in her work without either posing or revealing. Like her faces, she is there but why, we hardly know.
In this work there is the sense of a deliberate regression, a gesture refined and cultivated, yet also returning to the primordial sources and themes of art. Her recent works confirm such a movement. At the moment Melissa Coote is painting vast and obscure forms, no longer faces but bones from the skulls of giant animals – elephants and whales. Nature is here at its most primordial stage. In colour the artist is always sparing. She seems to want to banish everything to do with spectacle and effect, so that we are left face to face with plasticity, objects which are at the same time objects of meditation. It is not a matter of simulating some cult now long gone or vanished into the distance, but, rather, a question of summoning back the links between art and ritual, reviving the power of works of art to absorb and bewitch us. What is bizarre is that, without there being a secret hidden, everything here is elusive and held back.