At night, Venice feels less like a city than a memory struggling to remain visible. Water absorbs the glow of streetlamps, marble facades dissolve into shadow, and every narrow canal seems to lead simultaneously into history and disappearance. It is precisely this unstable atmosphere that British painter Nigel Cooke captures in Bad Habits, his monumental new exhibition at the Fondazione Querini Stampalia during the 61st Venice Biennale.

The exhibition marks Cooke’s first solo presentation in Italy, yet the encounter feels strangely inevitable. Few contemporary painters are as preoccupied with the instability of time, the fragility of civilization, and the collision between ruin and renewal. Venice — a city built on sedimented histories, flooded myths, and architectural ghosts — becomes the perfect psychic landscape for his work.

Installed inside one of Venice’s oldest cultural institutions, Bad Habits is not merely an exhibition about place. It is about what remains after certainty collapses.

For more than two decades, Nigel Cooke has occupied a singular position within contemporary British painting. Emerging in the late 1990s with bleak, meticulously rendered scenes of urban decay, Cooke steadily moved away from straightforward figuration toward increasingly unstable visual languages. His recent works hover between abstraction and representation, as if images are constantly forming and dissolving before the viewer can fully grasp them.

That ambiguity reaches a new intensity in Venice.

The paintings in Bad Habits pulse with nocturnal energy. Vast surfaces of bruised purples, acid greens, ember reds, and inky blacks seem simultaneously cosmic and subterranean. Human limbs, animal fragments, waves, bones, and architectural echoes flicker briefly into visibility before disappearing again beneath dense storms of brushwork.

Cooke’s paintings do not present fixed narratives. They behave more like weather systems.

Cooke created the works during a residency at the Fondazione Querini Stampalia, where the Portego della Biblioteca was transformed into a functioning studio overlooking the Rio di Santa Maria Formosa. The decision to paint directly inside Venice matters profoundly here. These canvases feel soaked in the city’s humidity, instability, and historical density.

Venice appears throughout the exhibition not as postcard beauty, but as a layered psychological condition.

The artist repeatedly returns to the idea of the palimpsest — surfaces overwritten across centuries yet never fully erased. That concept first emerged during Cooke’s trip to Athens, where he studied fragmented classical sculptures and became fascinated by the Greek word thraûsma: ruin, trauma, fragment.

Those ideas migrate directly into the paintings. Scraps of text dissolve into gestural marks. Bodies emerge from turbulence only to collapse again into abstraction. Time folds inward.

Venice itself becomes another fragmentary body.

Between Turner and Francis Bacon

Cooke’s achievement lies partly in how fearlessly he engages art history without becoming trapped by it. His paintings converse with J.M.W. Turner, Titian, Bellini, Francis Bacon, and postwar abstraction simultaneously, yet never feel derivative.

The Turner connection is especially potent in Venice. Like Turner during his late Venetian period, Cooke abandons stable contours in favor of atmosphere and dissolution. Light becomes liquid. Space becomes uncertain. Form becomes sensation.

Yet Cooke’s surfaces possess a muscular aggression absent from Turner’s ethereal haze. Thick, nervous lines whip across the canvases like electrical currents. Figures seem flayed open by movement itself.

In works such as Night Ruins (2026), storms of incandescent brushstrokes nearly consume the composition entirely. A faint sail-like structure hovers near annihilation. The painting feels suspended between apocalypse and rebirth.

Elsewhere, Francis Bacon’s influence appears in the distorted corporeality of works like Cabin Fever (2026). Flesh-toned forms collide with animal anatomy in scenes that feel simultaneously mythological and biological. Cooke transforms Bacon’s existential terror into something more fluid and collective — less isolated scream than shared psychic turbulence.

The Language of Marks

What makes Bad Habits so compelling is Cooke’s ability to make painting itself feel unstable and alive.

The exhibition marks a notable evolution in his practice. Earlier works often relied heavily on assertive linear structures. Here, line remains important but no longer dominates. Instead, Cooke orchestrates a far richer vocabulary of gestures: vaporous washes, stabbing daubs, translucent stains, looping contours, and flickering calligraphic traces.

The paintings breathe through contradiction.

Opaque passages collide with luminous transparency. Dense accumulations suddenly open into atmospheric emptiness. Certain areas feel archaeological, others almost digital in their restless fragmentation.

At moments, the canvases resemble neurological maps or cosmic diagrams. Elsewhere, they evoke decaying frescoes barely surviving centuries of erosion. Cooke draws from paleontology, mythology, neuroscience, and philosophy, yet the paintings never become overly theoretical. Their intellectual complexity remains embedded within visceral sensation.

You feel these works before you decode them.

Although Bad Habits draws heavily from history, the exhibition is unmistakably contemporary in emotional tone. Beneath its painterly sophistication runs a deep current of unease.

Cooke’s Venice is haunted not only by the past, but by the atmosphere of the present moment: ecological instability, political fracture, social exhaustion, and civilizational anxiety. His dark palettes and fractured imagery mirror a world that increasingly feels suspended between crisis and transformation.

Yet the paintings resist despair.

Throughout the exhibition, flashes of radiant color break through the darkness like signals from another emotional register. A glowing orb in 2 in the AM-PM hangs ambiguously between sunrise and extinction. Electric streaks cut through dense passages like veins of possibility.

Cooke understands that uncertainty itself can become fertile ground for imagination.

That tension gives the exhibition its emotional force. These are not paintings about collapse alone. They are paintings about survival through instability.

Venice and the Future of Painting

Venice has always functioned as a testing ground for painters. Turner came here to dissolve landscape into atmosphere. Monet arrived to study the instability of light. Bacon found in the city’s decaying grandeur a mirror for psychological disintegration.

Nigel Cooke joins that lineage while pushing it somewhere distinctly contemporary.

At a moment when painting is often flattened into spectacle or market commodity, Bad Habits insists on painting as a site of philosophical inquiry and emotional complexity art. Cooke does not offer clean symbolism or easy interpretation. Instead, he creates immersive visual environments where history, memory, myth, and perception continuously mutate.

The result is one of the most intellectually ambitious and emotionally resonant exhibitions surrounding the 2026 Venice Biennale.

Walking out of the Fondazione Querini Stampalia and back into Venice’s labyrinthine streets, the city itself begins to resemble one of Cooke’s canvases: unstable, layered, beautiful, wounded, unfinished. The water reflects fragments of architecture like broken memories. Shadows stretch across bridges. Time feels strangely circular.

Few exhibitions manage to alter the way a city looks after you leave them.

Bad Habits does exactly that.