Deforme, Centro Cultural Ricado Rojas
Ciudad de Buenos Aires, Argentina. Text: Teo Wainferd & Maximo Jacoby, 2012

Deforme [Deformed], by Teo Wainferd and Maximo Jacoby

Everything started with a yes. When Cynthia Cohen accepted Maximo’s idea to make a work team with Teo, to talk about her work and try to name things. Think about words and make the works that create the script for the exhibition appear alone.

And this is how the work was done. By looking in Cohen’s work for those features that, with time, came and stayed. Beyond idioms, schools or apparent speeches. Beyond the comfort arising from the name others chose to point at us. With as much freedom as it would be possible for us, we tried to remove, layer after layer, the skin from the surface. And we could see how, by breaking the same pre-established rules in job roles, the internal logic arose based on questions, many of which had no answer, outside the work itself.

Deforme is the product of this research. With a work we deemed important to look at again, another unprecedented one here, and some hint of the new one, we rescued the gesture that appears time and again in Cohen’s work.

The lack of consistency in her manners of saying. The monstrosity and the explosion. The beauty by default. The features of apparent reality. They turn her work into a device of a strange nature. Organic and hard. Like those erratic presences that change their shape, according to who is looking at them.

Teo Wainferd and Maximo Jacoby, 2012