The Whistle, 15” x 16”, oil on linen, 2021
Introduction by Stuart Shils to the catalog for Many Worlds Exhibition,
Lancaster Galleries, 2021
A sea defining its own edges off the coast of Alaska...
A bird tree like from an ancient story for children...
A kite flying in a land I don’t know where but want to go...
A compelling hairdo that feels more like the gentle hills of western Connecticut in summer...
The Many Worlds of Alex Cohen, delicious illuminations for an evolving dream theater, are just the narrative counterpoints I need after the intense collective uncertainty of this past year. Each is an intimately compelling window into a sensuous imagination ferrying me across the border to an unexpected land of its own design.
At first it seems that I can recognize and name situations, objects and architecture, but exploring further, realize that I really have no idea what’s going on, and that nothing makes ‘sense’ in the conventional way. But in painting, instead of clarity I prefer a provocative imagination fluent with curiosity, mystery, and intrigue; and those qualities or conditions are the pleasures and virtues revealed within the choreography of Alex’s expression, made visible by crusty, layered paint - also an important part of the story, the vessel of the voice.
As a child, long before I knew what painting was or could be, I discovered the planetarium, where part of my own emerging imagination was to be hatched. Sitting in darkness at the Fels Planetarium on the Parkway in Philadelphia, the sudden and dramatic revelation of the heavens came as an operatic flash in which the senses were seduced and then slowly, moment by moment the narrator laid out an adventure. First the entire cosmos unfurled, then the narration adjusted the focus to the Milky Way, then finally moving closer to our own Universe and to our heavenly constellations.
The structure of that experience - being grabbed and held visually, and carried deeper into other worlds, became a foundational thought-template for exploration and discovery that decades later I realized was also related to looking at and making paintings. Exploring Alex’s Many Worlds, I feel more than see the presence of the hidden narrator smiling behind a mystical veil, as the aromas of color and form seep into my eyes and mind, along with the contours and crevices of his own universe.
The construction of that universe in paint has been Alex’s extended focus for these last years, and as his audience we are invited to participate in that construction because a painting is not 'finished’ until it has been actively tasted and digested by the viewer. There is no need to ask Alex what these paintings mean nor about how to approach them because his work is done and now, it’s time for us to do our part. The point of looking at painting is to be taken in and taken away and not to worry about where we’re going because knowing the destination in advance might hamper the great adventure. Painting is poetry and a journey as much for the painter as for the viewer, and we follow with a playful curiosity, remaining open to paying attention and to realizing that we might encounter what we don’t yet know is there. Alex is offering us a bridge into his Many Worlds and our job now is to cross it.
Stuart Shils
Philadelphia
April, 2021