Nadia lives in the corners, where she weaves cobwebs by smashing mirrors into an analog dream.
First, everything is transparent, a curtain behind the curtain. Then comes the opacity. There is a hole in the word and an eye looking back inside it. Translucent entities emerge from the corners. A mantra of book titles praises the certainty of wood. The agency of light is reversed through the floor bouncing off the ceiling, dry water, and the peeling of flashlights drawn on the bark of the trees. Those flashlights are pendulums oscillating between the cold of the glass and the warmth of the flesh. Magenta and yellow sleep together but split their reveries.
How many touches lie numb in the tangle of guitar strings, rings that are prisms of the black and white rainbow?
“Light never gets old”, we hear as the only answer.
— Enrique Enriquez, Historian
INTERPRETATIONS
In the beginning Coën reaches for word: exhaling letters, arranging/re-arranging/permutating/according to her intentionality to provoke fire, arouse fluidity, bestow air…
Constant movement of placing/dis-placement disempowers old stale ways of hiding, asking for courage to allow the hidden light, the light of beginning, to illuminate a walkabout on her ground of shattered mirrors.
And in the ways of her ancestors she gathers the broken shards of light, waters the mystical upside down tree to sing an alchemical song with inanimate guitar strings still resonating the song of wilderness, the dance of spirit and matter.
Coën’s poetics yearn towards justice, her call is the timeless desire of artist-as-partner in conjuring the inner essence of the many-colored-robes of outward appearance.
— Tabita Shalem, Poet
Nadia Coen creates a world that has yet to be seen. Whether her worlds are made from texts, reflections, projections, or solid matter, she describes a subconscious landscape that feels both ancient and familiar. This dimension of existence that Nadia describes is overlooked and hard to build, but with her work she calls attention to its existence. Through the process of accident and restructuring, she creates a spatially unfamiliar and new way of reading that is both sublime and surreal. Her complex process of discovery requires an incredible amount of patience, curiosity and perseverance and the quality of her work reflects this dedication.
When I first met Nadia in 1985, while at the NYU School of Art, she was working on large canvases made from found materials covered in dark textural fabrics that resembled ancient and floating continents. Through her wildly physical painting process, she was looking for inherent meaning in the act of the engagement with the language of the tactile. Since then her work has evolved dramatically but her pursuit of the language remains the same. No longer hidden under raw materials, Nadia’s present language of practice reflects her fall into a transcendent dreamscape and her works are remnants of what she has seen there.
— K. Merz, Ph.D.