Cora Cohen Recent Paintings 1997

As is mostly the case with Jason McCoy’s exhibitions, the recent paintings of Cora Cohen are elegantly done, finely structured, somewhat mannered, but inevitably alluring. Cohen is essentially a late, quite late, abstract-expressionist who deploys all the means and skills, the vision and craft, offered by her mentors to make beautiful paintings — but paintings using such unappealing and unlikely colors as to cancel the beautiful, and impose a tension which gives her works not appeal, but power.

The colors are Germanic, martial colors, Flanders about a war, the jungle without light: the murky greens, bleak browns, sludge black washes, vile chartreuse, colors of despondence. And all are treated as if they were really raspberry and light blue and chrome red. Cohen’s paintings, color aside, are mostly swirly compositions done with brio and delight, and in one late work with quiet reflection, but it is her color that transforms, the color that offers the shock of the new. Obviously mere off-blacks and deep browns in such hands have a far greater capacity to shock than much of the schlock imported to SoHo in the name of the new.

Cora Cohen is not shockingly new, is in many ways a descendent, not an innovator, but I am shocked anew at the vitality possible in the familiar. The elegance of means, the shadow of the past, the style of attack is confounded by the colors — ugly colors for beautiful paintings, and paintings not simply done beautiful, but in the end beautiful because, not despite, the murky ambers and swirls of off-yellow and rotting sienna. And Cohen’s struggle between the brush and the palette has been won, not by one or the other, but by the tensions created. And the happy result is still beautiful, despite itself, shimmering, swirling, ugly and gorgeous