Flora Cohen at Bernice Steinbaum
“Art In America” Review of Exhibitions
The depiction of religious experience is unusual in contemporary art. It's a difficult and complex subject, fraught with potential controversy, mostly off-limits in polite conversation and publicly funded art. Given religion's centrality in the current social and political discourse, one wonders why more artists don't tackle it.
Flora Cohen accepts the challenge with a light touch and a quirkily oblique perspective. In six delicately trenchant, wryly humorous Images, she distills the memories of her two teenage years In a Catholic nunnery. She works in a technique that combines acrylic paint and pencil drawing on paper surfaced with gesso. Her pictures refer to the tiny images of illuminated manuscripts but are enlarged to 6 feet and more in actual size and seem to float in mystical dimensions of psychic time and space.
The religious order she joined, moved by reading an autobiography of The Spanish mystic, Saint Teresa of Avila, followed a strict monastic rule requiring not only poverty, chastity and obedience but also silence. This experience supports her mixed-medium image, Horizontal Thought. On a transparent blue expanse, a swaddled figure lies in a passive curve, suspended in a heavenly hammock of spidery filaments, surrendered to the life of the mind. In her installation of the unframed piece, Cohen continued the pencil lines at the upper corners onto the wall and up to the ceiling, reinforcing the idea of unearthly sky-hooks above.
It helps to know that Cohen was born and raised in Cali, Colombia, a place with a reputation for bloody battles between drug lords and the law matching that of Chicago during prohibition. In such a violent ambience, it's not hard to imagine a young Jewish girl seeking refuge in quiet and contemplation.
She closed that chapter in her life, came To New York, studied filmmaking at NYU and made several short films. Now, with some distance from her youthful commitment to the convent, Cohen layers her pictures with intimations of spiritual transports disturbed by the pressures of passion. She repeats the elongated, weightless figure, arms and legs encased in an androgynous habit, above which hovers a pale head with hollow eyes.
This pious apparition is often challenged by surrounding
areas of hot, textured red. In one image the words "Cali Plaza de Toros"
appear, in another, a predatory rooster with a gory spur, both evocations
of macho rituals involving flesh and blood.
Cohen's images project a delicate mix of emotions and thoughts, a cool echo
of Spanish religious art with its blending of ecstasy and cruelty. They
suggest the conflicts and connections between spiritual striving and physical
self-immolation,
Even though her work is oddly comical, an Edward Gorey-ish combination of
strangeness and humor, she doesn't mock the human aspiration toward spiritual
purity, but respects it. The final picture in her narrative may represent
the extinction of her saintly ambitions, though, the horizontal tube of
the monastic figure, as if on a funeral bier, bears on its breast a sexy
red flower with a gleefully rampant pistil.
-Paula Harper