Bomba de Brillo/Espectacular [Bomb of Brightness/Spectacular], 2020






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Bomba de Brillo/Espectacular [Bomb of Brightness/Spectacular], by Florencia Qualina

Worshipping images is as old as our existence on earth. Let us skip any mention to the Cave of Altamira or the human shape of the Greek Olympus as it is not necessary to go so far away in time. Devotional atavistic bonds are updated by the second in countless images edited using filters and layers of Photoshop aiming at the core of our desire.

Cynthia Cohen’s rotating paintings making up Bomba de Brillo/Espectacular refer to that concept, desire; in other words, the productive organization that builds desire. The fact that I decided to arrange images in a dual and fragmentary fashion does reinforce the punctum; the pin nailed on pupils dilated by the ongoing excitement provided by the world as an infinite catalog of goods available for consumption. Euphoria goes hand in hand with imbalance, as rotating paintings put it.

A party of food, landscapes, animals, and paintings, that needs to be looked at thoroughly. Processed food painted with the same monastic dedication of an editor of digital images; paintings and fragments of tapestries replicating dots or quick brush-strokes, coarse textures, anachronistic fabrics, industrial printouts. Every image is a prism of languages: Hyperrealism, Pop, Impressionism, advertising photography… Cynthia manages to merge a learned and analytical approach about painting in a remarkably easy fashion in Bomba de Brillo/Espectacular; she does so readily at the same time, in a familiar way by using a series of visual codes that are part of our daily life. It is at this stage that we could quote R. Lichtenstein’s statement: “The closer my work is to the original, the more threatening and critical the content”.

Florencia Qualina, 2020