Trotter&Sholer is pleased to announce representation of Ezra Cohen as well as his first solo exhibition, The Desert. Cohen has been painting for 20 years, studying under mentors Edla Cusick and Knox Martin. The Desert presents five figurative paintings inspired by art history, mythology, and solitary artistic exploration.
Cohen’s works are an exercise in storytelling. They draw from life, myth, and nature. Cohen’s works are also heavily influenced by his passion for and study of art history. References to Titian, Cezanne, Matisse, and Picasso can be found in his paintings. Cohen’s works strive to honor these artists who came before him. He uses his work to tackle
life’s big questions, approaching each canvas as an opportunity to explore, engage with history, and allow the work to detach and transform.
The Desert is the largest painting in the exhibition. It draws its name from Cohen’s playwright father, Ian Cohen, whose play “The Desert,” follows a young man in search of God. At its center is a figure, represented in absence, drawing. The work is layered and exacting, yet Cohen was careful to leave parts of the canvas exposed. Woman Dreaming depicts a woman washing her feet in a clawfoot tub, while a representation of her self lies reclined in front of her. Sol: the Beginning captures a large black snake, wrapped around a sleeping body. This is Cohen’s portray of the fall of man, while Rosemary, echoes some of Sol’s imagery in an intimate scene after the birth of a Nephilim, or mysterious being. Finally, Prometheus After Titian depicts an eagle eating Prometheus’ eternal liver. Each work represents a moment in a larger story, revealing details that straddle the universal and the particular.
Cohen builds the surface gradually with thin coats of oil paint, applied in many layers and occasionally wiping paint away with a rag. His representations, however, are intentionally flat, with background and foreground together on one plane. Shapes reoccur in reverse, or upside down, rhyming with one another. This exhibition offers the viewer glimpses into a parallel world of creation, sacrifice, life, and death.
