The work of Belgian artist Jeanine Cohen (1951) escapes definition. Between painting and sculpture, in the vein of minimal art but dedicated to emotion and responding to an intuitive approach, it is nonetheless deeply coherent. Gathering pieces from different periods, the exhibition A Meeting on a Wall reveals the characteristics of work that began in the 1990s which is still expressed today with a resolutely contemporary guiding thread. Her leitmotivs, light, reflection, space and colour... foster a sober and refreshing formal vocabulary, with inexhaustible creative exploration.

Trained in screen printing and industrial design at ENSAV La Cambre, since the beginning of her career, the artist has felt an attraction to painting, which she has taught to herself. In love with colour, she makes it the meeting place for a pictorial and spatial experience which her reliefs immediately invite you to. Each tone used is chosen maturely by the artist, and is the result of in-depth research, achieved by the superimposition of successive layers of pigment. The colours in her palette are unique creations in themselves, which bear witness to the chromatic diversity of the world around us. Because the artist draws her colourful inspiration from nature and architecture, in particular from her travels.

When she began, her passion for colour led Cohen to work in monochrome, but very soon, the artist came to excel by combining tones. This sensory approach gives her work very sensual qualities. But don’t be mistaken, although she inspires softness and harmony, she also defies your glance. Jeanine Cohen’s works are immersive and have multiple faces, like living characters, deployed through each nuance of light. According to her own position and the position of light, the spectator may discover not only one but several aesthetic proposals in her reliefs and collages. The wall, where very often a fluorescent coloured stretch applied to the back of the relief is reflected, is part of the work. Very subtly, Jeanine Cohen’s work questions the impression of immediate perception, and reminds each of us of the infinite complexity of the vision and diversity of her images.

The artist plays with emptiness and fullness, as shown by the series Plenty of Empty and Plenty and Empty, or here more recent works entitled Black Line, which are an interplay of balance in space, lighter and lighter, suspended. Jeanine Cohen always brings the exhibition space into her work, which becomes an essential component of it. Her interest in space and architecture, which leads her to accept integration commissions, was already evident in her works from the 1990s (Untitled), which recall the geometric and ascending aspect of the urban landscape. In this way, each exhibition is an opportunity to discover how Jeanine Cohen’s work takes possession of a new location.

Laura Neve, Art Critic