Sealed with a Kiss

A kiss is sent through the air from the mouth to the hand, and from there it is blown farther away, into the wind. Such are the images in Eliya Cohen’s exhibition: lightweight and upward oriented, they generate a floating movement and slight agitation. The sent kiss signifies the physical gesture without actual body-to-body contact. By the same token, in painting, sprayed paint leaves a mark, without any intermediate contact, of a tool or a body, with the painting surface. The artist uses the “traits” of graffiti, which allude to a defiance attempt by a powerless unit in the face of powerful forces. A quick emergence, asserting presence, a hasty validation of being, which ends in escape. The reductive quality derives from the juxtaposition of courage and fear; applying minimal friction, which leaves a singular mark, and withdrawing.

The PVC is the main painting surface. Its impervious, weather-resistant sheets are extensively used in marketing and advertising, and also to hide construction sites, and by the homeless to build makeshift shelters. It is a material with a double function—a visible, professed front and an obfuscating, covering rear.

The affinities between the sign and the surface are tense. Cohen seeks to fix a motion and a sign on the opaque surface, in which the color is not absorbed, but rather remains lying on top, neither connecting nor being assimilated into it. The signs, too, are segments of graphics, marketing, urban images; impressions that were not imprinted on the retina, but rather stuck to it and may be scraped off, like the acrylic paint on the PVC. They are laid gently, like bodily gestures arising from the subconscious of the eye, which in a flash perceives a piece of cloudy sky, a store sign, a house number, and a peeling wall. These undergo a process of diffusion to become a single image on the canvas.

The shutters and bars stem from the same qualities, associated with the transitions between exterior and interior, standing as a buffer between the inner world and the sweeping power of the outer world. The impressions imprinted on the shutter are remnants of the friction between the two worlds, the interruption: logos transform into weighty repetitious musical notes. The entire installation is motivated by the deconstructive power of the outside world, introducing it to a personal-psychic dimension, and bringing it out into the world again as a musical score, sprayed on the art object.