Chris Cook

A magician is never someone you can fully trust, and Chris Cook knows it. He builds a show around that doubt and turns it into the whole point. He tells the story of forger Han van Meegeren, whose own work was dismissed by critics as unoriginal, which pushed him to create the most convincing unoriginal painting of all time, a new Vermeer. Vermeer painted using the projected image from a camera obscura, tracing the shadows in front of him rather than building the structure underneath that painters normally lay down first. X-ray a Vermeer and that groundwork simply isn't there. So was he faking it, or just using a tool nobody else had thought to use? Van Meegeren copied that approach so well that some of his forgeries were sold as genuine Vermeers, and critics at the time called them among the finest examples of his work. What's real and what's fake stop being opposites in Cook's hands. What's magic and what's truth start to blur too. A fantastic show. @chriscookmagic @edfringe