Milan, Italy, 1924

Linda Kohen’s work permeates a sensitive and poignant emotionality, an amalgam of loneliness and memory that shapes a whole metaphysics of intimacy and echoes in the unfathomable abyss of the heart the indefatigable rumor of time.

Born in Italy, Linda was a young girl who knew exile and her burden of abandonment when she settled with her family in Uruguay, evading the anti-Semitic laws of her native country. It is in this south of the world that the painter carries out her training, having as initial masters Pierre Fossey and Eduardo Venazza in Montevideo, and Horácio Butler in Buenos Aires, to finally finish her apprenticeship at Taller Torres-García, where she joined in 1949. first works still lifes and landscapes of the Uruguayan capital, when the affective burden that covers his painting and the attention to the microcosm of everyday life, with its objects and places apprehended in a transitory moment, such as Caja Celeste (1960) and the Puerto de Montivideo (1960).

From the 70s onwards, white and low tones, colors of dissolution, and figures that alternate between rigid straight lines and smooth curves predominate in his paintings. Then there are themes that emerge from Linda’s intimate life, such as Cajas com rojito (1987), whose interior seals the past materialized in small artifacts, ready to be revived by the exercise of memories, or the many dishes, cutlery, bottles, furniture, apparently banal objects, that make up his series Las Horas (1976), references to a fragile daily life, dismantled by the authoritarian regime that starts to govern Uruguay. In Soledades (1980-1981), the painter practices a peculiar form of self-portrait in which the predominant element is not her figure, but the solitary position of her body in relation to the surrounding space, always revealed from the trunk and the limbs. , as in Acostada 1 (1981) and Caminando (1981). And in the series La Cama (2002-2003), the bed where birth, love and death occur, it registers the whole of life.

In all of these examples, the use made of the elliptical and incompleteness is notable. This can only be overcome in an act of filling in the observer, who, unaware of the painter’s inner universe, can only accomplish it by probing presences and absences that lie within himself, thus opening himself up to the anguish that Linda transmutes in image, this vertigo in the face of the cruel freshness of becoming, which makes beings and memories fade away.

VRP