Eyelids: Brazilian artist Felipe Cohen’s solo exhibition on view in Bucharest

Eyelids, Felipe Cohen’s first solo exhibition in Romania, is on view at Gaep, in Bucharest, through August 13.

The exhibition revolves around 13 new paintings from the ongoing series Eyelids, in which the artist juxtaposes circles and horizontal lines in various configurations. “Similar to his display cases, a type of sculptural objects that he has been making since 2013, these compositions are inspired by the sun setting in a liquid horizon – a moment that favors reflection and mirroring.”

His practice focused during the past decade on exploring the reflection of light in nature. “Light, with its ability to create color and depth, to dematerialize the horizon through reflection, to emphasize shapes, is at the heart of the artist’s inquiry. Cohen tackles the subject by abstracting and geometrizing the landscape. Still, his use of form and color transcends geometric exactitude and infuses the works with a poetic feeling. For him, the landscape, either in the medium of painting or in sculpture, has always been a pretext to talk about the dynamics between light, space, and time.”

Prior to Eyelids, Cohen has explored the reflection of light in several series of display cases that bring together transparent and opaque materials characterized by various degrees of fragility – for instance, glass vs. wood, and by contrasting textures and weights (felt vs. marble). Two such objects, on view at Gaep, “use transparency and reflectiveness to create the impression of solid matter floating in the air. The optical effect serves, for instance, to conjure up the moment when the sun seems to touch the horizon and flow into the water.”

Felipe Cohen (b. 1976) lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil. He is the winner of multiple awards – illy SustainArt Award at ARCOmadrid (2016), Atos Visuais Funarte (2007) and Fiat Mostra Brasil (2006) – and a four-time nominee for the PIPA Prize in Brazil (2016, 2013, 2012, 2010).

His work is part of museum collections such as Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, Museu de Arte do Rio and SMoCA: Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art. Recent solo exhibitions include: Sol que abre o céu (Galeria Silvia Cintra + Box4, Rio de Janeiro, 2022), Pálpebra (Galeria Millan, São Paulo, 2021), Broken Light (Ivorypress, Madrid, 2018), Luz Partida (Galeria Cavalo, Rio de Janeiro, 2017), and Ocidente (Kubikgallery, Porto, 2017).