Un jardín sobre la playa, una playa sobre la ciudad, una ciudad sobre el cerro
del Paseo Gallery, Punta del Este, Maldonado, Uruguay. Text: Natalia Malamute, 2019
All about my Mother, by Natalia Malamute
The last time we had lunch in the workshop I said I found the place very untidy. It is always a bit untidy, as expected. However, this time there was something different, something in such mess that worried me.
Instead of the typical succession accounting for the idea of series, works were now scattered and overlapped: there were some pieces of fabric on a stool, they were remarkably small for the artist’s traditional format, and showed flat shapes in bright colors; a horse posed serious on another medium-sized piece of fabric, and a huge gigantic diamond was the backdrop. It was possible to perceive traces of a language that had not been exhausted yet in all of such paintings. The works as a whole were a kind of exquisite corpse, disorder within order, where the painting was always at the start and at the end.
There is no rule in the spaces inhabited by Cynthia Cohen. Distanced from contemporary art recipes, the artist shows us in this exhibition a repertoire of objects by way of collage—an update of her desired images. It seems to be an arbitrary selection but, at the same time, there is nothing chosen randomly. Her figures continue to be clean and satin-finished, like those that have a direct impact on the audience, an immediate “wow”; however, they have now been carefully remixed.
Such mess seems to work as a type of transition towards another place that is still uncertain. Maybe it is there where I felt uncomfortable upon entering the workshop. It is an exhibition without instructions, at a time where instructions appear everywhere. Cynthia Cohen respected, once again, the pleasure she feels when painting, the vertigo emerging from freedom, doing through questions rather than certainties. Now that I think about it, it has always been like this. I tell you this because I know her well.
Natalia Malamute, 2019
