catalogue essay Dr Jacques Rangasamy
Stevie Cohen’s oeuvre is an intense visual inquiry, not into the world of matter, but of its underlining symbolic energies. However the result is not illustrative of symbols, as tarot cards exemplify, for Cohen’s vision does not translate into, nor uses elements of concrete reality, still less an abstract subject matter. Rather it is the tension between the world of matter and its underlining forces and patterns of meanings that has come to preoccupy her and win her creative devotion.
Cohen’s work is responsive to the many aesthetic scruples that the world of matter instils in those who live a creative existence. For Cohen, its many seduction entrap the human spirit into states of creative stagnation, of subordination to crippling ideals, and rob it of its freedom to roam, even if aimlessly. Significantly, the design framework provided by the edges of her paintings and drawings are not the primary compositional obligation for Cohen as it is for many abstract and figurative artists. She trusts the pencil and brush to evolve both marks and their defining structures. Nevertheless, Cohen’s visual reflection is marked by restraint. The excitement that relationships of form and colour in pictorial conventions past and present produce remains a matter of perpetual curiosity, and percolates into her own creativity only selectively. She explores rather than explains, questions rather than solves, exposes rather than resolves. Her gestural approach to creating images and meanings is perhaps the immediate pathway into her work available to us. It enables us to trace her steps, pause at her hesitancies and fascinations, wonder at accidents and curiosities, but most essentially, be surprised. Cohen has the gift of infusing richness in her shapes and colour. But the richness serves the purpose of her dialogue with her viewer, and not developed exploitatively for the sake of it. Another aesthetic scruple.
