In daily life we convert the uncertainties of initial seeing into coherent views. In doing so, the nuanced complexities of first sight are subsumed by our predilection to make sense of the world. My current paintings affirm the schism and disjuncture inherent in the initial act of seeing: when things are first glimpsed, before logic and rationality take over, before an image has been grasped, when points of view don’t necessarily cohere. To this end, I seek sensory visual experience that is mutable and difficult to convert into objective fact.
A given subject – a work of art or physical object charged with personal or historical significance – provides a source for my paintings. During the process of working, the multiple, seemingly contradictory, ways of seeing and making come into play. There is a moment when my source material ceases to be my reference point, when the act of painting – the process of adding and subtracting paint – takes over and becomes the subject as well as the content of a work.
My recent paintings begin as mediations on actual artifacts that have interested me for decades – the syllabary, logograms, and pictograms considered during the many attempts at the decipherment of Linear B script. They are done on linen and paper with water-based paint, raw pigment, and oil. During the course of their making, acts of figuration and their subsequent erasures occur. The paintings come into being through the oscillation of emerging form and its dissolution. Following the trail wherever it goes, I include peripheral elements that develop during the process of their making. Any sense of meaning is displaced by a shift away from tangible image. Through uncertainty, erasure, displacement, fracture a painting emerges.
Cora Cohen
New York 2012