For one so young - he received his MFA in 1993 - Avrum Cohen has dark thoughts in his mind, or at least in his dreams. He also has a masterful and beguiling way of translating these mentations onto the canvas. His one man show, recently on view at the Inner Space Gallery, Erector Square, contained eleven works, mostly obliquely figurative oils and a few drawings.
Psychoanalysts would have a field day with Cohen's dream-laden content. He offers scenes of deeply mysterious, mummyluke figures trapped in spiders' webs or being devoured by long legged creatures, hell-bent on destruction. Are these the resurfacing memories of an abused past, or a gloss on our disease-ridden culture that daily sees the wrapped bodies of the young consigned to an early grave? In a sublimely tender painting, on of these living mummies bends over another, as if caring for it.
Cohen is not afraid of either large or small formats. The show's eye-catcher, "Living in Strange Dreams", is a memorable 95 x 53" oil of one of his signature wrapped beings suspended in the web of an oversized bug. The canvas is a bright gold whose brilliance wraps the horrifying action in the glow of resurrection. Likewise, his miniature drawing, "Below the Ocean" enacts in a few perfect pen-strokes a scene from the unknown reaches of an oceanic world.
If the artist's youth peeks through, it is in the titles he gives the works. In addition to the show's title, "Tug of Sleep", which, right away, demands that we think literally of dreams, he burdens his canvases down with such phrases as "Way Down", or "Caught in the Moonlight" or the above mentioned "Living in Strange Dreams". These callow desciptions discriptions distract from the multiple and mysterious meanings the paintings invite.
This one, minor point aside, Cohen's work is already astonishingly accomplished. This viewer, for one, is eager to see what other dreams he's made of.
-by Michael Rush From Arts New England, Regional Reviews, 1994