CYNTHIA COHEN
THE SHAME
Sep 26 — Nov 20, 2024
Curator and Essayist for the Show: Laura Isola
Additional Text: Larisa Zmud
Dot Fiftyone Gallery is pleased to present The Shame (Behind the Scene), the first solo show by Cynthia Cohen in Miami. Cohen’s paintings regenerate the historical gaze on the naked female body, creating new relationships between the work and the viewer. She disrupts the logic of art history, reinventing the relationship between subject and observer, private and public. Her work simultaneously veils and unveils sexuality.
“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 a 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 the conditions that shape our ways of seeing. The fictions and non-fictions of cinema history tell stories in which men live out their fantasies and obsessions through linguistic commands, imposing the silent image of a woman bound to her role—her condition of not being a creator of meaning. Beginning in the 1970s, films examined through a psychoanalytic lens began to question how the unconscious, shaped by the male gaze, structures our ways of seeing and deriving pleasure from those dominant images that shape who we believe we should be.
Cynthia Cohen draws upon these popular and symbolic productions, which transcend borders—a characteristic gesture of the pop genre—to engage in a dialogue with her own work. Through new ways of seeing and thinking about women, she creates a space of intimacy between the work and the audience or voyeur. The sensual red velvet, reminiscent of brothel sofas, cinema seats, and theater curtains, pulls the viewer in, bringing them face-to-face with 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 examines the connections between the artist and mainstream cinematic representations of forbidden eroticism and rebellion. Cohen’s approach to these images, through incisive figuration, both references and questions the history of art, bodies, and the male and female gaze. A shared foundation lies in these formative representations. What did they shape? What bodies did they bring into being? What did they allow us to be and do?
Cohen explores the ambivalence embedded in the imagery of films such as Emmanuelle from that era, focusing on the contradiction between the forbidden and the permitted or prescribed. Preciado argues that pornography was invented by museums, which stored works containing explicit sexual representations out of sight, thus announcing their prohibition. A similar dynamic occurs with Cohen’s images: they are not simply to be seen but are subject to regulations on how we view them. We must observe them in secret. Cohen recreates private moments of viewing, where sexuality is observed clandestinely. The curtains keep the shame.
At first glance, these scenes may appear celebratory, but within their intimacy, within that hidden space where we must enter to observe, we find a challenge rather than a celebration. The normative gaze is broken, and we are encouraged to see through new eyes—eyes opened to formative sexual experiences.
Cohen reveals that, to create these works, she had to step out of her “comfort zone” and confront the embarrassment and modesty of exposing a family secret. Typically, her process begins with a search for images on the internet, photographs of objects, and toy animals. She also draws inspiration from plasticine shapes or digital collages, which she later transforms into paintings. Cohen frequently works with scale modifications, as seen in the Pan Dulce series, where she referenced her grandfather’s paintings. However, this time the process was different. She set up scenes with actors and sets, directed them, and had them photographed. With a clear vision, these scenes reflected a specific era and theme: the exploration of female eroticism in the 1970s, while also revealing aspects of her childhood—the perception of the unseen yet felt in the environment. The project explored the seed of the formation of the ideal desirable, erotic, forbidden woman.
This photographic project was done in collaboration with Catalina Arango, the producer of this and many other projects they have worked on together. Arango, with great knowledge and immense patience, gently introduced Cohen to the world of cinema. They scouted locations, rented period clothing, cast actresses and actors, and hired a set designer, makeup artist, and lighting technician. They rented props and organized catering, as food is a fundamental part of eroticism and consumption. Together, they built several sets that enabled Cohen to recreate the atmosphere captured in the photographs.
During an eight-hour session, Cohen directed naked bodies posing for clandestine encounters. She made decisions about the placement of each individual—dressed men, naked women—and explored themes of control and vulnerability, with women serving male satisfaction. The scenes conveyed both solitude and complicity. It was a significant challenge. The second challenge was translating these scenes into paintings—defining brushstrokes, working with shadows, and immersing herself in the textures of fabrics, which were both stimulating and complex.
In The Doors of Perception/Heaven and Hell, Aldous Huxley writes, “This was something I had seen before—seen that very morning, between the flowers and the furniture, when I looked down by chance and went on passionately staring by choice, at my own crossed legs. Those folds in the trousers—what a labyrinth of endlessly significant complexity! And the texture of the gray flannel—how rich, how deeply, mysteriously sumptuous! And here they were again, in Botticelli’s picture.” Reading this a week before embarking on the ambitious task of painting these scenes, Cohen took it as a sign, a premonition. It became a way for her to free herself from the theme and focus on the pure act of painting—to let go and immerse herself in her own deep, sumptuous folds.
Cynthia Cohen is an accomplished Argentine artist and a graduate of the Prilidiano Pueyrredón National School of Fine Arts. She has exhibited widely in Argentina and internationally. Recent notable exhibitions include Revelaciones at Galería MC and Cien Caminos, Un Día at the Museum of Modern Art (2023) in Buenos Aires. Her work has been shown at prominent venues such as Bienal Sur, Museo Marco, and Galería Del Paseo, Peru. In 2022, she published her first monograph, Folklore Expresivo, covering her work from 1995 to 2022.