Raphaele Cohen-Bacry: The Only Game in Town

Raphaele Cohen-Bacry, Ace of Hearts (detail), 2021, hand cut collage on paper. Image courtesy Darren Johnson.

Raphaele Cohen-Bacry, The Only Game in Town at the Sahara West Library

By D.K. Sole

“Several years ago I stopped using paint brushes or any direct tools in an effort to break patterns and repetition, and I developed new ways of approaching painting,” writes Raphaele Cohen-Bacry. “The natural evolution of this research brought me to collage.” The world around us all is overstuffed with pictures for her to cut up but in The Only Game in Town she protects herself from the infinity of choice by restricting herself to a specific surface: the front of a playing card. The cards in this show come in different sizes (most of them are large) but the basic elements, of course, are the same. Each one has the same proportions, stands vertically; and it has pips, numbers, and maybe one of a limited number of stiff human figures.

She lets these things influence the colors and shapes she lays over them, reacting to the red pips by adding more red in a similar shade, or acknowledging the presence of a human face by slicing a picture of a different face through its eyes. The edges of the cards are her allies. Her cut-out shapes point or bulge inward from them, flowing over the numbers, alien things coming from the outside to play with the pre-printed marks. There is something out there and it’s her. The static cards look kinetic and restless. In the press release she tells us she cuts up art magazines, incorporating other people’s works into hers, and this is obvious in some of them when painted cyprus trees or a scrap of Miró’s Le Chein Bleu, 1959 appear inside her shapes. Interestingly her collages never try to become those other things. The cyprus tree one doesn’t look as if it’s trying to say something meta about landscape painting. The meaning here is not that kind of meaning.

She cites CoBrA and Tachisme as her two prime sources of inspiration and her attitude towards her materials aligns with the way they placed action above theorising, their love of  “the mark as a sign of well-being, spontaneity, experimentation” (Christian Dotremont). Her shapes reminded me that Tachisme enjoyed stains and splots and pours. I was aware of the difference in speed, though: the fact that her runny marks had to be felt out by a hand holding a knife before they existed. The nature of the material didn’t dictate the shape, she did, guided by her thoughts about Karel Appel or whoever. It was not the same as pouring paint and letting the environment dictate the puddle. And then she would have to paste it. She would have to do something to ensure that the edge of the shape aligned with the edge of the playing card, instead of letting the canvas break the mark naturally. She leaned into the artificiality of it by letting the pictures on her source material carry across the fake dribbles. There were explosive splashes but they had a formal painting of a bouquet inside them. The flowers were little splats of colour, but they were also flowers, carefully depicted. It was not wildness that was irrepressible here, but civilization. These moments felt like a jokey update to the movements that had inspired her. As if she was saying that no matter how much artists want to create gestures from the depths of chance, their spontaneity is going to be haunted by historical order and the harmony of genre.  

This is not the kind of neo-Dada collage that smacks objects together in a surreal juxtaposition, creating a shocking centaur, nor is it the kind of contemporary collaging that uses its abundance to suggest that modern life is filled with too much information or mental buzz, or that the artist is drawing pieces of our shared world into a private vision, like Trenton Doyle Hancock’s Moundverse. Cohen-Bacry’s work is funny and luxurious. Rich emerald greens, a caramel velvet. One greyscale card suggests Cubism, the sliced eye suggests Un Chien Andalou, 1929. A horse for some reason! I love this horse; it arrives out of nowhere, this photo of a black horse’s head in the middle of a nonfigurative show. This was the moment when it really felt as if she had fulfilled her mission to “break patterns,” at least from the perspective of me, the viewer, but she had to fill the rest of the room with the abstractions of blobs and splashes before I could see it. “Playing cards are not ‘the only game in town,’” it whispers. “Chess is here.”

Raphaele Cohen-Bacry, The Only Game in Town
March 7 – June 11, 2023
Sahara West Library, 9600 W Sahara Ave, Las Vegas, NV 89117

Published by Wendy Kveck on April 3, 2023