In isolating this close-up view, Cole is allowing that brief flash to be lengthened, the contemplation extended indefinitely. They present a view of a painting that is so close as to be near-forensic: the kind that you only usually see briefly, in a gallery, when you take the risk of setting off an alarm to lean up close to a painting and get a sense of the brushwork. I don’t know which paintings Cole takes his pictures of, but inherent in the imagery itself is what Cole seems to be suggesting as a valuable mode of seeing. In fact - whilst deviating drastically from the kind of parameters that usually make an Instagram picture successful - the images offer a very different kind of gratification: the slower, harder-won but more sustaining kind that comes from close and careful looking. Will they stay for these images that, really, offer no immediate gratification (by Instagram’s standards) at all? Will they apportion them likes? (Stephen Shore has ‘liked’ almost every one of these images, perhaps tellingly). Cole’s own words from years previously - “provocatively unexciting” - come to mind: he is experimenting, perhaps, with the limits of his followers’ patience. Sometimes the faint cracks of a painting that has aged over the years are visible sometimes the grain of the canvas itself is visible often the subtle tones of a red that burns and deepens, or a blue whose wash is made up of teal, navy and cerulean, can be seen when you look at the image for more than the brief moment usually allocated to Instagram looking.

When you click onto an image - or when it appears on your own feed - it is revealed to be a close-up image of a section of painting, often with a near-uniform colour (though there are multi-coloured squares, too, more as time goes on, but always in the abstract). At first glance, it looks like a grid of almost single-colour squares. All this thinking and writing is a precursor to his current approach to his own Instagram feed.

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