Marc Cohen
Kanada (Canada)
Kunstart: Malerei
Technik: Ölmalerei
Statement:
My work is a meditation on finitude. Is the edge a terminus, a limit that contains, a boundary that confines, or a threshold? Can there be a Beyond without a border to demarcate it? There are those who say the eternal is inconceivable without the temporal, its model and arch signifier. For me, it is the finite that presents the difficulty. How does one conceive of an end? How does one say: Beyond this, there is nothing more? Is it not more accurate to posit a Here that is a transition to There?
In considering these questions, I draw equally on the languages of abstraction and representation. In my abstracts, the voices of such ostensibly incompatible figures as Pollack and Kelly, Klein and Stella, Richter the colourist and Richter the minimalist, converge and commingle in a multi-vocal dialectic. The resulting angular rhythms recall the cadences of modern serial music and free jazz, compositions liberated from the hegemony of the tonic.
In my figural works, my investigation into the question of finitude extends into the temporal dimension. Here, the technologies of representation as developed by Warhol, Rauschenberg, and Johns are not so much utilized as emulated. An ordinary, photographic image is selected out of history, apparently at random, altered digitally, then either meticulously hand copied, or transferred from a meticulous hand copy, directly onto canvas or illustration board. The process is repeated until there emerges an odd collection of seemingly unrelated moments from time, inviting the viewer to draw new relationships and meanings among the data so presented. The resulting image resembles screen print, but is in fact several times removed from the original subject. Warhol once said that the copy of a copy is an original; in my work, not only the copy, but the process of replication itself, is simulated. As the poles of virtuosity and replication are collapsed, the boundaries that contain and define originality blur. History is presented not so much as the selection and assemblage of finite facts, as the production of simulacra.
Aktivitäten / Ausstellungen:
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english
español
francais
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