Cora Cohen at Jason McCoy - exhibition of abstract painting, New York, New York

Cora Cohen's latest display reafirmed her commitment to abstract painting. Diverse in materials and gorgeous in color, seven paintings blowed on the wall like natural phenomena--seemingly shaped without effort or intervention, held together by the agency of their own energies and a whole s of gravity. More balanced than a certain quantity of of her previous work, utterly confident, smooth elegant, they are extraordinarily delicate, despite their load of materials: acrylic, flashe, oil, dusted pigment, graphite, charcoal, pastel, watercolor, enamel, polyurethane, cent iron, marble dust; embedded within them, a toothpick, a staple, strips of fabric, plastic mesh, other castoffs. In earlier works these applied uncompounded bodys have at times stood in high relief; here, they mingle into the overall strategy of the surface, stumbl on as the eye wanders end the shifting terrain of the canvas.

Cohen intends to be inclusive, informal, nonauthorial, linking her paintings to the world outside her studio by means of refusing to categorize or limit her choice of materials, her rules and attitudes. Thus, she confronts the hard varnish of industrial polyurethane to the grit of dusted pigment and stone, the plain glimmer of metallic dust to more conventional mediums. She also extends an array of abstract painting techniques from staining to dripping, pouring, splattering and spreading--a virtuoso performance codfished to the movement of the body

Orchestrating a manifold series of incidents that direct the eye like accidents--or the reverse--without aspiring to a dominant, transcendent image, Cohen chases a development that is at one time instinctive, sensuous and fluid. The possibility of meaning in her painting is everywhere equally at hand to be read simultaneously: a feminist's concordance.

This exhibition, however, was a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of more visual in its address than it was polemical. It ranged from the high-key colors and high-flying frame of mind of The Process of Decay Is the Proces of Crystallization and Intrepid Allegory to the more balanced beauties of hemlocks, Peacocks, in which the equilibrium is jarred and started humming on the contrary not upset by touches of acid virids vibrant yellows, oranges, reds and whites. An untitled work, the next-to-largest canvas in the exhibit is also the most abysmal the most meditative, as surface agitation gives way to spatial implications. Lighted through a cool interior glow, separated up by areas of fulvous and white, softened and made arch by greens, pinks, gray-greens, gray-violets, its tangled spills and stains of dark ceruleans violets and blacks converge in what might be taken for a revisionist version of Giverny.

These works constitute an homage to abstract painting, with regards to painters as various as Jackson Pollock to leeward Krasner, Morris Louis, Joan Mitchell, Brice Marden, Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter. Cohen appear to bes to have considered the throw out of abstraction with both historical astuteness and a practitioner's sensitivity, and these gracefully lyric, if slightly nostalgic, paintings are the record of that collision Although these works do not separate the many impasses confronting contemporary abstract art--at times they look recapitulatory--Cohen finesses the theoretical moot points of her project by her skill and her quite evident be fond of of painting. In this instance, familiarity bring forths content.

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