One
could easily believe that Kevin Cooley’s Controlled
Burn #2 depicts an elaborately sewn and stuffed “soft sculpture,” a
billowing tornado of black crepe rising from a glow of fake flame and ember.
But it is indeed actual smoke and fire. That seeming contradiction—that
something as insubstantial and ephemeral as smoke could appear so weighty and
graspable—is just one of the dualities that Los Angeles–based artist Kevin
Cooley explores in his Controlled Burn
series. “Fire is a powerful natural force that we harness for greater good, and
it is the only Classical element that we can create on demand,” the artist
notes. “Yet, when out of control, it has the potential for grave destruction.”
Even Cooley’s title suggests the risk and contradiction inherent in an endeavor
as seemingly foolhardy as making a large-scale studio portrait of something as
fleeting, formless, and dangerous as fire and smoke. Yet the artist succeeds,
revealing a beauty we might not suspect could be present in something as
fearful as a cloud of suffocating smoke.