as a girl, Cynthia Cohen She was shy, introverted and lonely. Her refuge was drawing. When she was twelve or thirteen years old, she asked her maternal grandfather —the painter Juan Carlos Faggioli— where she could study and he recommended Maria Mihanovich’s workshop. After high school she took a year of architecture, but she wasn’t too interested in it. She retraced her steps and went to study art at school Prilidiano Pueyrredon and also studied graphic design. There she found her way to him.
“Make our secrets productive. That is art”, the plastic artist Remo Bianchedi once told him. “Art protects you and saves you. It seems trivial, but it is not. At no time have we been saved without art”, adds Cynthia Cohen, already consecrated as an Argentine pop artist.
He shares his artistic passions with his daughters Sofía and Natalia and with his partner Jorge Telermancultural manager and director of the Teatro Colón.
News: Beyond what meets the eye. What interests you to tell in his works? What themes run through them?
Cynthia Cohen: I’m just finishing my first book that covers half of my career and there is a theme that runs through everything, which is that of women. The woman who cleans, the one torn between home and career, the one subjected to a role, the one who transforms herself to be pleasing to the desire of the other and today I am working on a series of women, which I did together with the choreographer Leticia Mazur, where there is a naked trans woman and where there is talk of struggle, company, solidarity and with a nude that is rarely seen in paintings.
News: How is your way of being a woman and how do you feel today?
Cohen: Quite full and calm. with me in relation to my partner, my daughters, my career. I’ve been through divorce, gender violence, I’ve had an abortion. Luckily, we have acquired some rights. The struggles are necessary, like that of the trans woman, and I have empathy with those struggles, even if some of them do not go through me. It is quite exemplary how we have achieved, for example, the right to legal abortion. There is some machismo in society, but there are also women who have important places of power, like Eva Perón or Cristina Kirchner today. I do not make a value on this nor do I say it as something political. We are a rematernal society, we always need a woman, a mom to tell us what to do.
News: How are you as a mom? How have you raised your daughters?
Cohen: We are very united, but with a lot of freedom. I separated from the father of my daughters when they were five and six years old and I transformed a home that was going to be traditional into a fairly open one and I have enabled my daughters to many things. The world of art is very similar to both of them.
News: What do you do?
Cohen: Natalia (28) is a sociologist, art curator and works in an art gallery and Sofía (29) is a fashion and art director and photographer.
News: And when did you begin to consider yourself an artist?
Cohen: Laura Batkis, in a course I was taking with her, introduced me as an artist and I couldn’t believe it. I was just starting out and thanks to her I started going to the workshops of Pablo Suárez and Marcia Schvartz. It was a push and in that appointment I took charge of my role. But I started to feel like an artist after my first show, in ’99, when a girl approached me and told me that she had felt very identified with the women in my works. There I saw the power of the work and said: “This is art.” Something of mine that I transformed transcends and reaches another person. I understood what it is to be an artist.
News: Do you have routines, moments to work, some music?
Cohen: I am very diurnal, I like the day. The Beatles have always accompanied me, national music too, classical music, opera. I’m very curious, I like rap and now I’m exploring trap.
News: What do you feel when you paint?
Cohen: Mine was always trial and error. I like to feel free and take risks. That is why I am very mobile within the issues, in addition to the issue of women. I use certain elements that speak to a certain group of people. Romero Brest spoke of “lunfardo pop”. For example, I worked with certain animals that respond to folklore, such as roosters, horses, bears. Also huge rings that turned into stones and I ended up making a three meter meteorite in Córdoba.
News: Can you live from art?
Cohen: In his time, my grandfather could. He was a teacher at Avellaneda, he sold his paintings, he had his own house and my grandmother did not work. Today that is almost impossible, much less having your own home. With Larisa Zmud we did an action called “Twenty-five available units”, where we sold as if they were apartments from the well. The buyer could choose three different sizes from two of my series and this year we added a penthouse with the jewelry series. He paid thirty percent less than the real value of a work already done and acquired a personalized work. And we had an interesting flow of sales.
News: Does inspiration come to you at any time or when you are working?
Cohen: Today I started a new work and it occurred to me yesterday while I was driving. The thought, the reflection on what I want to do is constant and at some point the idea crystallizes. I am in a very fertile creative moment of my life.
News: In addition, she is in a relationship with Jorge Telerman, a man of culture and current director of the Teatro Colón. It must be very fruitful too.
Cohen: Yes, we are very different, but there is a shared sensitivity. Everything I see, what I hear at the Colón, and before, when Jorge was director of the San Martín, that whole universe feeds me a lot. It’s a spectacular back and forth. See it through him, hand in hand with him and the artists I’m getting to know. We were recently at an opera festival in France and saw some mind-blowing contemporary stagings of classical works. It is an absolutely rich world for me and resignifies my view of art.
