Robert Cooper

Robert Cooper

The Rabbit

18th May - 17th June 2023

Coups Contemporary

How will we interact with nature once it is gone? What will it look like? And what will it be for? 

This exhibition focuses on the character of one of the recurring animals that make up Cooper’s biomorphic language of drawing, sculpture and painting: the rabbit. For Cooper, the rabbit represents a hunger for knowledge, fueled by desire. They act as troublesome and flirtatious creatures that appear at inopportune moments, encouraging chaos and seducing humans blindly towards their predictions of the future.

The work on display depicts the rabbit's apocalyptic vision of a post-nature world. The vision contains natural disaster but also skips forward to a version of nature that comes after the end- to a world where nature has been repurposed, stylised and enhanced into a consumer friendly experience. Inspired by recent visits to the dioramas in the Natural History Museum, Cooper began to feel like these reconstructions of the natural world now would soon be a way people would come to view the past. Instead of preserving what already exists, humans would find a way to extract nature's aesthetic value and repackage it as a semi-digital product.

In the rabbits' vision of post-nature there is no need for variation or biodiversity. Species and habitat become irrelevant as what motivates consumer interaction is aesthetics. Nature becomes stylised and saturated, colour-coordinated and calm. The landscape drawings on display are copied from the backgrounds of Disney animations with the characters removed. They speculate on the appearance of nature when its function evolves to solely provide an aesthetic experience. An appearance based on nostalgia, composition and mood lighting.

The rabbit itself is shown pushed to the point of abstraction. In paint and pencil the contours of ears, eyes and tails glimpse in and out of view and morph into one another. Once animals as we know it have gone, why would they need to be recreated in their current form. Could they shape shift? Would their colour be customisable? In 'Kit', Cooper has reduced the rabbit’s form into a logo. The spirit of the animal functions fully as a commodity, stripped back into mass-marketable form.