Dot Fiftyone is pleased to present The Shame (Behind the Scene) first solo show by Cynthia Cohen in Miami. Cohens paintings are about regenerating the historical gaze on the naked female body to create new relationships between the work and the viewers.
“If our sex is for pleasure and children, how do we live it? How do we live our sex? We don’t appear naked in this film gratuitously, nor to be ogled. We want to affirm our desires. Pleasure not perversion, sexuality not sex shop.” Agnes Varda, Réponse de Femmes, 1975
To look is to position oneself in a certain place and establish a frame. The multiplicity of viewpoints is influenced by conditions that outline ways of seeing. The fictions and non-fictions of cinema history tell stories where men can live out their fantasies and obsessions through linguistic commands and imposing the silent image of a woman bound to her role, to her condition of not being a creator of meaning. Starting in the 1970s, films read through a psychoanalytic lens began to question how the unconscious, shaped by the male gaze, structures ways of seeing and feeling pleasure in those images—those dominant images that shape what one believes one should be.
Cynthia Cohen takes these popular and symbolic productions, whose reach transcends borders, a characteristic gesture of the pop genre, to dialogue with her own work. Based on new ways of seeing and thinking about women, she creates a space of intimacy between the work and the audience or a voyeur. The sensual red velvet, reminiscent of brothel sofas, cinema seats, and theater curtains, abducts the viewer and confronts them just a few inches away from these erotic scenes. A private gaze in a public space. A distance that complicates the traditional role of the voyeur. A woman enjoying her own sexuality. A man at her service.
This series of paintings manifest the links among the artist and the mainstream cinematic representations of forbidden eroticism and rebellion. Cohen’s different ways of approaching these images, with incisive figuration, reference and question the history of art, bodies, and female and male gazes. A common denominator is these formative representations. What did they form? What bodies did they make possible? What did they allow us to be and do?
Through the imagery reinforced by the films, such as Emmanuelle, of that era, Cynthia Cohen explores the ambivalence of those contemplations, placing particular emphasis on the contradiction between the forbidden and the permitted or prescribed. Preciado says pornography was invented by museums by storing works with explicit sexual representations out of slight, announcing their prohibition. This happens with Cohen’s images: they are not allowed to be seen without trying to regulate our way of seeing them. We must observe them in secret. Cohen recreates reserved moments of looking. Sexuality copied in secret. The curtains keep the shame.
At first glance, these scenes appear celebratory, but in their intimacy, in that hideaway where we must enter to observe them, we notice a challenge rather than a celebration, breaking with the normative gaze and seeing through new eyes. Eyes opened to formative sexual experiences.
Cynthia Cohen’s paintings are about regenerating the historical gaze on the naked female body to create new relationships among the work and the viewers. Cohen disrupts art history logic and reinvents the relationship between the subject and the viewer, the private and the public. Her work shrouds and strips sex.
