gary grills cooper, 2026: a reading in seven lenses
Acrylic on canvas, 55 × 75 cm (21 ⅝ × 29 ½ in). Painting by Yiğit Özen.
At a Glance
The cigar is the one line segment that does not curve on a surface where every form curves; it descends forty five degrees to the left from the level of the mouth, cuts the left wing of the light-value collar and remains the only unit that overturns the frontally established order, because it has no counterpart in the right half. The head has been worked like a real portrait: low eyelids, sagging cheeks, a wrinkled forehead, an age that can be read. As one descends, that meticulousness is abandoned. Between the shoulder and the belly close to twelve roundnesses ride over one another, their colours pulling towards red cabbage, aubergine, onion, and the arm does not close into a cylinder. The man waiting beside the fire looks as though he is made of the thing that will go into the fire; the difference between the one who burns and the thing to be burnt is lifted here. There is also a reading that does not count the swelling as the body's own volume: the arms that come out from between the masses are thin and of ordinary length, the largeness like an epaulette put on the shoulder afterwards.
The brazier in the lower left corner gathers the whole saturation and the whole darkness of the surface into a single place. The embers are built with fingernail tip strokes that do not mix into one another, from a distance a single reddish mass, up close grain by grain; the black that turns around the vessel, meanwhile, is the most opaque paint in the picture. There is nothing cooking on it, neither meat nor skewer has been set down. The fire has long since caught, yet the man still waits in the gesture of lighting, his gaze does not come down to the embers, it passes over them and goes off into the distance. The very thin bar between the hands reads in one place as a match, in another as a skewer, in another as a toothpick; what they share is that nothing at all is fixed to its end. The title splits a cowboy's name down the middle and inserts the grill between the halves, and because the same verb also means to put to questioning, an interrogation room opens right beside the brazier. The stance is close to a duel, there is no one opposite, there is no pistol in the hand.
The ground stays within the same warm family throughout, opening from saffron as far as clotted cream and crossing to the cool nowhere; nor is there any darkness falling beneath the figure. The two dry turquoise scratches at waist height are the only coolness, and they read as a belt of water in the distance as much as a crowd marked in. There is no separate figure at the edge watching what goes on, the place of witness left empty.
Form and Composition
Some twelve roundnesses weave the body in two rows; while the left edge cuts this cluster, a hand's width void remains between the right shoulder and the right edge. Between the pinhead points of the ellipse in the lower left and the large figure there is no mid-sized unit.
In the upper half there is a single line segment that does not curve, descending to the left at an angle close to forty five degrees from the horizontal. A thick short bar, its length about two thirds of a head's height, its start at the level of the mouth. Because every form around it is curved, this diagonal stands apart by its hardness. On its way it cuts the left wing of the light-value collar and laps the two edges over one another. It is the first unit to overturn the frontally established order, because it has no counterpart in the right half. The head does not touch the upper edge; a void about a third of a head's height remains in between.
The body is woven from roundnesses. Some twelve units can be counted, their diameters close to one another and all of them a little under the width of the head. They are arrayed in two rows: the upper row opens out horizontally at shoulder level, the lower row stays more compact at belly level. Because dark roundnesses and mid-value roundnesses trade places in turn, a staggered rhythm comes out within the mass. The outer line of the cluster does not close; where the roundnesses lap over one another the edges eat into each other. The left edge cuts the two roundnesses in the upper left; between the point where the right shoulder ends and the right edge, on the other hand, a hand's width void stands. The silhouette's distance to the edges is not equalised on the two sides.
The collar opens a wide V in a light value, its arms going up towards the shoulders, leaving a small dark triangle at its base. At mid height two arms set up a horizontal band and cut the round cluster in two. The arm on the left comes up from below, the arm on the right reaches inward from a place near the right edge, and the two hands meet at the exact centre of the painting. Between them there is a short bar the thickness of a line. The heights of the arms are not equal, the one on the right half a hand above the one on the left. This band is the longest horizontal to run without a break.
A light-value block fills the lower third. Its edges are almost upright, its interior undivided; this is the emptiest and flattest piece of the surface. On its upper boundary there is a horizontal seam mark, the only clear line separating the cluster from the block. From beneath the block a single light extension descends and reaches the bottom edge. The extension does not fall at the centre of the block, having shifted to the right; the load-bearing vertical stays a palm's width to the right of the centre of the mass. The distinction between it and the ground does not hold there, the value of the extension coming out the same as the light ground beneath and the boundary not being read.
In the lower left a large ellipse sits, the left edge and the bottom edge cutting it in two places. A thick dark circle encloses the interior, its inside filled with countless points the size of a pinhead. That is the painting's finest textured area and it holds the bottom rung of the scale on its own. The passage from the large figure to these points happens in a single step, with no third stage in between. From the upper edge of the circle short vertical tips rise upward, their intervals irregular. In the back area at mid height there are thin horizontal scribbles, the figure dividing them down the middle; the piece on the left is a finger long, the piece on the right five fingers. The void gathers most in the upper right quarter, where there is no unit at all. In the lower right corner there is a small signature. The eye starts from the face, drops to the lower left with the bar, returns to the centre with the band of the arms, slides down from the light block and gets caught in the point area of the ellipse.
Colour and Light
While the tiny strokes in the bed of embers squeeze the whole saturation into a single corner, the black bowl that holds it falls beside the lime white shorts and brings the two ends of the scale together in the lower half. The plum purple bubbles read dark because they stand opposite the saffron ground, and the pale turquoise scratches on the two sides are the orange's only antidote.
The bed of embers in the lower left corner is filled in with strokes the size of a fingernail tip, and the whole saturation of the surface is squeezed into there. Within it there are tangerine orange, cadmium yellow, blood red, a pink escaping to purple, and a few pale greens that have got in between; the paints are set not one over another but side by side, and none has mixed into the other. From a distance it gathers as a single reddish mass; as one comes closer it separates grain by grain. The bowl that holds this is almost full black, its outer edge escaping to blue. The darkness on this canvas is gathered in a single place, and that place is here.
The whole of the ground stays within the same warm family. In the upper band an orange between saffron and amber, drawn in wide horizontal scrubs and in a single layer, the direction of the brush read everywhere. As one descends white mixes into it; at mid height it opens to the consistency of honey, in the lower right region to vanilla, and at a few points as far as clotted cream. This opening is not soft but mottled; in some places the white has been left half mixed. The orange covers more than half the surface and at no point crosses over to the cool side, so the heat is a property not of a particular region but of the whole field.
The bubbles that build the body hold the whole of the cool in the middle region. The two large circles at shoulder height are plum purple; the one on the right dark enough to stay between damson and black, the one on the left lighter with white seeped into it. Sage green masses have got in between them, their saturation low, well lightened with white. Because the purple stands close to the amber's opposite on the wheel, at its every contact with the ground it reads darker than it is; the green, on the other hand, since it stays midway between the two sides, slides to grey at the edges where it touches the orange and gives up its liveliness. At the boundaries where the purple and the green meet the two paints have passed into one another while wet and the colour loses its name there; at the centre of the chest, at the base of the left arm and beneath the belly, blurred areas close to brown are left. The darkening of one side of the bubbles gives them roundness, but that darkening is not grey, it is a denser state of the same purple.
The head and the arms stand on the side of the ground. The flesh of the face is between sand and wheat, its darkenings made with brown; at the hairline, when that brown meets the orange, the difference between them melts away and the edge of the head sticks to the ground. The cigar is the fullest dark on the face, with a red verging on wine on its wrapper; the bright state of the same red is in the grains of ember. The collar and the shorts beneath are lime white, laid full and opaque, with only the trace of a faint green grey in place of shadow. The two ends of the lightness scale have come side by side in the lower half of the canvas: the black bowl and the white shorts are close enough to touch one another. In the upper half neither full white nor full black is met with, everything there staying at the middle register.
On either side of the body, at the same height, there are light turquoise scratches. Laid scattered with a dry brush, and because they do not cover the orange beneath them they drop to green here and there. They are the coolest note on the surface, and although their saturation is turned down, in a field where the orange goes as wide as this those two small coolnesses hold the palette in balance. Looking for a direction for the light yields nothing; there is no darkness falling beneath the figure, the orange continuing without any change at all right down to the foot of the legs. The only place that gives rather than takes the light is the cluster of embers, because no black has been mixed in between the yellow and the orange grains. A few red tongues rising up from the upper edge of the bowl touch the ground, and they are the reds closest to disappearing within the orange.
Iconography, Myth and Title
The verb that splits the cowboy's name down the middle preserves the duelling set-up, but between the joined arms there stands a match instead of a pistol. The body's being made of red cabbage and aubergine roundnesses turns the man beside the fire into the thing that will go into the fire; nothing at all has been set over the embers to cook.
A thick cigar is wedged into the corner of the mouth; its body dark, its tip verging on maroon. The face has grown heavy: the eyelids low, the cheeks sagging, the area above the brows come forward as a single ridge. On either side of the head dark tufts stand up like ears, its crown light and sparse. The shoulders are far too wide for the body, built of cabbage-sized roundnesses in which purple and green turn; the same roundnesses descend as far as the belly. At the neck a light-coloured collar has lain to both sides, a dark triangle left at the centre of the chest. The arms join in front, the two hands meeting in the middle; in one of them a small white block, and between them a thin bar with a red tip. Below the waist is white, and from beneath it a single leg descends ball by ball and is cut off at the bottom edge. In the lower left corner an enormous black brazier has settled.
The title splits a name down the middle. Gary Cooper, one of the best known faces of cowboy films; the type of the man who goes out alone into the empty street at noon, who knows how to wait. A verb has been inserted between the two pieces of that name, and the verb is to grill. The same word in English also means to put to questioning, so within the title, right beside the brazier, an interrogation room stands too. Cooper here can be a surname as much as the person seated on the other side of the table. Once housework enters the middle of the hero's name, the bearing that name carries shrinks as well.
The stance itself is close to a duelling stance. Standing, frontal, motionless; tobacco in the mouth, gaze ahead. But there is no one opposite and no pistol in the hand. The bar in the middle of the joined arms is the length of a match. With the match taking the place of the weapon, the thing to be drawn passes from the barrel to fire. The man who joins his arms in front of him and poses is also the unchanging stance of tradesmen's and guild portraits; he stands in front of the thing he owns. For this reason the scene is close not to a rite or an accident but to a portrait of office. No crown or throne has been set down as the sign of office, the work having been left to the shoulders. Rank has long been read from the shoulder; the cloak and the puffed collar exist in order to widen the silhouette. The tufts at the side of the head, together with the sagging cheeks, also bring the face closer to a dog; setting a guard dog beside the fire is an old habit.
The colour of the roundnesses that fill the body pulls towards vegetables: red cabbage, aubergine, onion. The man beside the fire looks as though he is made of the thing that will go into the fire. In the order of the burnt offering the one who holds the knife and the one who is offered are kept separate, whereas here the two are gathered in the same body. In old altar scenes the cook and the priest are the same person anyway. The human head built out of fruit and vegetables is a known formula that tells of abundance; its state here loses that side, because it has fallen next to the brazier. At the level of the hips a turquoise strip passes, like a belt of water or of shrubs in the distance; the ceremony is being set up in the open.
The inside of the brazier is the most crowded place in the painting. The embers are made of small vertical patches riding over one another, spilling up over the edge; they read as flame as much as they read as compressed little bodies. There is no separate figure at the edge of the brazier watching what goes on; the patches of the embers also read as an arrangement in which the watchers have been mixed into the fuel. Nor is there anything cooking over the embers; no meat has been set down, no skewer is visible. The fire burns on its own. The match in his hand looks as though it has not yet been struck, so the sequence has been broken too: the fire has long since caught, yet the man still waits in the gesture of lighting. His gaze does not come down to the brazier, it passes over it and goes off into the distance.
Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious
The mouth closed off with the cigar has given up feeding and speaking and been reduced to holding an object. The purple roundnesses that build the chest are no different from the material to be put on the fire, and while the difference between the one who burns and the thing to be burnt is lifted, the figure's eye never turns to the fire below.
A thick cigar comes out of the exact centre of the mouth and hangs downward, the lips gathered around it and clamped shut. The mouth here is not being fed, it is holding. Nothing goes in, no word comes out; the whole business of that region is not to let go of an object. If a satisfaction comes in return for sucking, this is a satisfaction that satisfies nothing. The flesh beneath the chin has sagged, and two deep grooves have descended from either side of the mouth. It gives the impression of a mouth that has held the same thing in the same place for years.
The eyes are half closed beneath heavied lids, the pupils shifted to one side. It is hard to guess where he is looking, but this much is clear: he is not looking at the thing burning below. In the lower left there stands a wide and dark vessel, its inside filled from top to bottom with reddish flecks. That is the most stirring, most crowded place in the painting; the face above, by contrast, is still. What is someone who does not look at the thing he is standing over choosing not to see? Not looking takes labour too. The lines gathered between the brows perhaps carry the weariness of this labour.
As one descends from the face the skin ends. In place of the shoulders and the chest purple and green roundnesses are piled on top of one another; I could call them cabbage, I could call them aubergine, things belonging to the kitchen. The body harbours no interior, it is built from objects arrayed side by side. There is no belly cavity for hunger to sit in, that place has been filled. That the chest of someone waiting beside the fire should be made of the material to be put on the fire is an odd equation; the difference between the one who burns and the thing to be burnt has been lifted here. The white collar at the neck is the only sign separating these two regions. It is not attached to a shirt but laid over the heap; it can also be read as a bib, and a bib is tied on the child who is eating too.
The skin returns in the places that touch the world: the face, the front part of the arms, the hands, a foot appearing below. The arms are crossed in front of the chest and have set up a knot that closes off the front. Between the fingers there stands something very thin, about the size of a toothpick. On one side there is that huge fire, while the hands are busy with this tiny object. The attention has been brought down to something that can be held, turned, whose measure is known. The cigar in the mouth and this thin object in the fingers look to be of the same family; one is sucked, the other is worked in the hand. The same movement being shrunk and repeated stands like one of the occupations anxiety finds for itself.
The pointed forms are gathered in a single place in the painting: the short tongues of flame rising from the upper edge of the vessel. Apart from that everything is round, soft, edgeless. The side that cuts and does harm waits at the very bottom, in the very corner, in the place the eye does not go. The vessel spills outside the frame, and we cannot see how much of it is left. Nor has a ground been drawn for the foot to tread on; the body descends towards the bottom edge without support. There is no small someone at the edges watching what goes on this time, the place of witness left empty.
Society, Power and Technology
The brazier is full of embers but nothing is cooking on it; the man has turned not to the embers but to us, because the title of the person who holds the tongs does not require him to do the job. That the arms coming out of the swollen shoulders stay thin shows that the largeness belongs not to the body but to the epaulette put on over it.
The inside of the brazier is full of embers and has covered the lower corner entirely, with nothing cooking on it. The fire is ready, the food is nowhere in sight. The man standing over it has not turned to the embers either, he has turned his body towards us. A huge cigar in his mouth, his arms folded over his belly, and between his two hands there stands a thin bar; it could be a skewer or a pair of tongs. His shoulders have swollen independently of the body, round masses riding over one another and spilling out to both sides. Below the waist is closed off with a white apron, and a dark strap has left its mark down the middle of his chest.
Who will take charge of the fire is not up for discussion in most households. On the remaining days of the week how the food gets made is not talked about, but on the day the barbecue is set up in the garden the person who takes charge of the job acquires a title. He hands the tongs to no one. The right to silence anyone who ventures to advise him comes with that title too. The hand that chops the onion, buys the bread, carries the plates and afterwards washes all of them is nowhere in the painting. The way authority is distributed is plain here: the part that lasts the shortest time and collects the most praise is turned into a ceremony, and the rest is dealt with without its name being mentioned. And this is how the difference between standing at the head of a job and doing that job is closed.
The swelling in the shoulders strikes me as a trick. The arms that come out from between those masses are thin and of ordinary length; the largeness does not belong to the body itself, it has been put on over it. The logic of the epaulette, that is; enlarging the man is hard, enlarging his shoulder is easy, and the distance forms of its own accord. The name in the title is borrowed too. The name of an old cowboy hero has been squeezed into the brazier. Taking a stance from the screen and carrying it into the garden is a learned habit here: the hard gaze, the closed mouth, a tool in the hand. None of these requires doing any work. Resembling someone who works is enough.
Look at the face and that hardness does not quite sit. The eyes are tired, the lids heavy, the cheeks sagging, the corners of the mouth turned down. The pointed tufts on either side of the hair stand like ears and have taken the head a little away from the human. The cigar stands between the teeth, but there is no sign that it has been smoked. When smoke, apron and tongs are all together a person is counted as working. Being seen is enough these days too; an image that goes into circulation before the job is finished can take the place of the job itself. The photograph of the meat is taken before the meat, while lighting a barbecue that has no audience is understood as an unnecessary expense.
Given that the embers are burning this vigorously, he has been waiting there for some time. No one is in a hurry. At waist height, on either side, there are light blue scribbles; they can be read as a crowd marked in from a distance, and there is not a single face among them that can be made out. The man has reserved the direction he poses in for them, and there is nothing at all fixed to the end of the bar in his hand.
Art History and Comparison
An aged head made with the meticulousness of a portrait sits on a body of lobes set down in a single stroke; the worker type that is standardised in Léger scatters here while it is being built. In Aertsen's butcher's stall the goods would be heaped to the front, whereas in this canvas the goods have passed into the body and the thing inside the pan is left unreadable.
A bushy moustache, cheeks fallen to either side, heavied eyelids, a wrinkled forehead; below, a thick cigar with its burning end turned towards the ground. The head has been worked like a real portrait, even its age can be read. Coming down to the body that meticulousness is abandoned; from the shirt's wide collar downward lumps riding over one another are ranged, the arms too are gathered out of those lumps, and as far as the white shorts sitting at the waist the body stays as a heap. The arms are joined in front of the chest. The problem of seating a real face on an invented body is one of the places twentieth-century figurative painting keeps returning to; here the two languages have been left side by side in the same figure, with no attempt to fuse them.
The worker type given frontally and at half-length, with his tobacco in his mouth, is among the most used templates of that century. It can be set alongside Léger's mechanic; there too the body is built from a repeated unit, and the cigarette in the mouth is a sign stuck to the man's trade. Léger's units are as regular as if they had come off a lathe, all of them fit the same measure, and the type is standardised in this way. The lobes here do not hold together, each is of a different size and set down in a single stroke, and the arm does not close into a cylinder. The type slips out of the hand while it is being built.
The large man chewing a cigar is among the old customers of the caricature vein. In Grosz's fat bourgeois the cigar is an instrument of accusation; the nape, the jaw and the lip are bound to a target, and the line hardens in order to sharpen that target. The weight of the face here is similar, its target absent. The cigar has settled like a plug closing off the mouth, and the gaze has shifted not to the fire below but upward. Botero had spread the building of a figure by inflating volume across the whole of his painting; his body grows as a single continuous shell, the skin nowhere divided. The volume here has been obtained by addition, the shirt cannot gather it up, and it spills outside on both sides of the collar.
To fill the foreground with food and leave a figure behind it had turned into a genre in Northern painting. In Aertsen's butcher's stalls the goods are heaped towards the viewer, and the seller drops to a small presence at the back. In this canvas the stall has been removed, and the goods look as though they have passed into the figure's own body. Inside the black pan at the lower left there are short touches whose content cannot be read, they stand somewhere between flame and meat, and thin tips come up over the edge. The first condition of a cooking scene is that the thing being cooked be recognised. That condition has not been kept.
The same bubble unit has been harnessed to two separate jobs on the canvas; while it becomes a large lobe in the body, inside the pan it turns into a short shred of flame, a single stroke building both flesh and fire out of the same texture. The surface is not filled from end to end, the ground has been left broad, and a horizontal strip of scribble wanders at mid height. There is no separate figure at the edge watching what goes on. The grill-man of shop signs smiles, leans over his pan, shows his goods; the title's splitting a film star's name in two and inserting the grill between the halves promises a familiarity of this kind as well. The man before us does not smile, nor does he show his goods. The right arm ends without a hand, thinning and sharpening towards the tip. In the other hand there is a white, folded piece together with a short bar with a red head, standing like a match. The single leg coming out from under the shorts, meanwhile, reaches the bottom edge with three or four lumps in place of a foot.
Material, Gesture and the Viewer's Experience
The short touches in the vessel were laid from below upward, half transparent and without mixing into one another; the light layer beneath them comes back through the gaps. Because the turquoise belt was roamed with an almost empty brush it could not cover the orange and dropped to olive at its thinnest places.
All the short strokes inside the vessel were pulled from below upward and not one of them mixed into its neighbour. The tip of the brush was used and the paint was thinned as well; each touch stayed half transparent and the light layer beneath it comes back through the gaps. Red, mustard and olive stand side by side, not one over another. The pointed reds shooting up over the black edge of the vessel were flung one by one; their tips are notched, because the brush touched the surface and lifted at once. The black that turns around the vessel, on the other hand, is the most opaque paint in the picture, taken round with a wide mouth and in a single walk. On the right side, where it entered into the white, a few bristles separated from the body and escaped outward, and that escape was not wiped away either.
In the round masses that build the body the hand works at an altogether different tempo. The flat brush was set at the centre of each mass and turned by following its circumference, and so the strokes sit on the back of the form. Into the large purple mass on the left a light pink was rubbed and the two paints entered into one another there; that is, the purple was returned to before it dried. On the right shore of the same mass there is a crescent that comes almost to black; the dark mixture settled onto the wet edge of the purple and no boundary was left between them. Where the purple thins the green beneath strikes up, that is the order of covering went from the green towards the purple. At the seams where the masses meet three paints muddied at once; those grey lilac corridors were left where they were.
The orange ground was laid over the whole surface at the very start, in wide horizontal passes. At the upper edge it stayed thin, the grain of the cloth reads through it. In the lower half white was rubbed into this orange while it was wet, and so the strips descending downward stayed light and rough. The turquoise belt in the centre is the driest paint in the picture; the brush was roamed almost empty, touching the crests of the grain and not going down into its hollows. The thinnest places of that belt escape to olive, because the turquoise cannot cover the orange beneath it. In the white collar the situation reverses; there the paint was not thinned at all and left a ridge at the edges.
The inside of the face was worked fast and wet. The whites were laid over the brown before it had settled, and so none of them stayed white, they dropped to a lilac grey. The two dark points in the nostrils are the thickest paint in the head; the brush was pressed there and lifted by being turned. The hair was flung with a brush whose bristles had parted and spilled right into the orange. The cigar is a single narrowing pull. Along its lower edge the brown of the moustache was dragged, that is the cigar was left before the paint beneath had dried; the maroon at its tip is a single press. The thin dark line between the hands was pulled with the smallest tool, in one go, and not corrected. The lower shores of the forearms dropped to grey, because the flesh colour was laid there while the dark beneath was still wet.
A fifty-five by seventy-five vertical canvas, a size that can be held in the lap and turned; all the strokes stay within the area a single arm reaches. Looked at from two metres the orange closes into a flat surface and the vessel turns into a single dark mass. Come down to forty centimetres and that mass falls apart, the touches within it can be counted one by one, and the purples too divide into separate turns. The screen burns the orange with its own light; on the wall the same orange is a matt and absorbent surface. The signature in the lower right corner was left over the dry ground in a thin red, in three or four quick pulls, and stayed thin enough for the yellow to read through it.
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