Private View: Wednesday, 7th October 2026, 6-8pm
London (Tower Bridge)
Candy for Crocodiles
Ralf Kokke
In a tropical landscape a female figure sits nestled within a tree. In her hand she holds a bunch of flowers – a gift or an offering to the jaws that creep perilously close to her feet. The jaws belong to a crocodile, its body, larger than the figure’s, at once part of the landscape and a hook or snare. This is Candy for Crocodiles, the titular work of Ralf Kokke’s solo exhibition at Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, which explores the tension between childhood fantasy and the passage of time.
The story of Peter Pan and Neverland – the concept of never growing up, never having to worry about what lies ahead – has long captivated Kokke. His paintings are visions of what he calls a ‘world of pure light’ that he first dreamt of when he was eight years old and continues to seek through his art. Bursting with colours, flowers and plants, fantastical creatures and hybrid beings, it is a world full of music and harmony, where a horse comes face to face with a tiger, a black panther meets a woman in a field of wheat, and a figure plays a flute to a deer, standing in a stream. The flatness of the compositions and the rough texture of the chalk paint which Kokke favours add to the apparent simplicity and serenity of these scenes, evoking a childlike perspective in which animals, plants and humans appear on the same spatial plane.
But even within this painted paradise, danger never fully disappears. It exists – whether in the form of a crocodile in the grass or below the surface of the water, a four-eyed lion stalking through the mountains, or a strange sky streaked with purple and pink – as a reminder of mortality. In Peter Pan, the crocodile that pursues Captain Hook has swallowed a clock that continues to tick inside its belly, making time itself the predator that cannot be outrun. For Kokke, however, the threat is not necessarily something to be defeated or even feared. Instead, it becomes part of the beauty of the world that he depicts. The flowers held by the figures in Candy for Crocodiles and in Flowers to the Panther gesture at an act of romance, but also of surrender – as if the figures are courting the very danger that surrounds them. Rather than struggling against the threat, they approach it with tenderness. Even in the painting Deep Below, where the merman aims an arrow at the crocodile beneath him, the gesture of violence becomes one of play: the merman is looking the other way, the arrow’s head fails to meet its target.
In this way, Kokke’s fantasy world becomes less a denial of reality than an invitation to see it differently. We may not recognise the scenes he paints, but we can relate to the longing to find beauty and meaning in a life that cannot last forever.
