Transformations

A painting is a wall turning into a window, one reality dissolving into another, a there becoming a here, a vision made concrete. Some artists want us to experience these magical transformations as if nature were revealing itself, but others believe that the very abstractness of the process pulls us in. The distinction between the representational and the nonrepresentational is not really the issue, for by now we realize that the frescoes of Piero della Francesca leave a stronger sense of the abstractness of experience than does Kandinsky in his Improvisations, where there is an almost naturalistic inevitability to the mingling of colors and the fluidity of forms. What really counts, what has become the do-or-die issue for painters, is the belief in painting as one thing becoming another—and the knowledge that it is technique that makes the transformations manifest, whether it is a matter of paint making light, or composition crystallizing movement, or discrete objects combining to create overarching patterns.

Such technical questions may be regarded as professional secrets, best left to the studio or the classroom. But anybody who has seen how a beautifully painted surface can summon up a dream has found painting’s heartbeat; and that is the pulse that a lot of people are looking for when they go to the galleries. Museumgoers who keep tabs on contemporary art are aware, of course, that painting is now marginalized, out-of-fashion, and (according to some) near death. The wildly enthusiastic response to the Robert Rauschenberg retrospective at the Guggenheim this fall suggests that for many people his collagist sensibility is just the kind of everything-but- the-kitchen-sink measure that is needed to keep painting alive. But a feeling that painting is besieged can also sharpen an appetite for the self-generating power of an art that can create light, movement, and transformation without recourse to the electronic gizmos that Rauschenberg pioneered.

With painters feeling very much on the defensive, there are a lot of serious artists who would agree that the time has come to give technical secrets a public presence, and turn the artist’s underlying issues into an explicit subject. Cora Cohen, whose paintings were at Jason McCoy this fall, is an abstractionist who knows how to tap into the hunger for the possibilities of paint. She has a luxuriantly idiosyncratic way of letting the paint । spill across the canvas, running color into color, thin over thick, after which she’ll blot out light with dark and use powdered pigment to dust the dark with another, lighter tone. Her compositions, in which the spills, the drips, the rivulets, and the brushings create a pewter-and- gold, Tiepolo-sky atmosphere, have an immediate impact. They are nonobjective evocations of catalytic encounters, of alchemical alterations. But there is something programmatic about Cohen’s heedlessness, and this kind of self-conscious impetuosity is a troubling development among painters of Cohen’s embattled generation. Cohen is almost too interested in allowing her materials—which include an eclectic range of oils, acrylics, resins, and powdered pigments—to intermingle on the canvas and work their own magic. She takes painting’s pulse, all right, but hearing the heartbeat seems to have become her dangerous obsession.