Untitled (Mauve Wall) :

As so often in my work, the scale is all wrong in this picture, the cues are askew, and there is a peculiar connection to the art world. It is almost impossible to tell whether we are looking at a photograph of a doll's house or a space for norrmal-sized people. If the door on the right is for you or me, the one on the left is for giants. And the circle painting, which looks like a mirror, could be a bad Giogio De Chirico appropriation. The painting and the mirror look as though they could have been bought off the shelf. But who knows. It is another thing to trip over. The same goes for the ventilator grid, the switches and the little signs that act loke spots of colour, to say notghing of the bordello-red wallpaper, the jagged mirror and the negative space under the table. What a tribute to the glorious era of postmodernism and contemporary recycling of recycling.

I would mainly emphasize here two aspects of this photographthat you don't find in most of my work.

The first is the colour. In many of my photographs this tends to be harmonious and muted. Here, however, it is the opposite. I am pretty sure the designer knew what he or she was doing. The mauve wall didn't happen by itself.

The second thing is how the space pushes you out. I talk a lot about the three-dimensionality of lmy images, and you would expect this one to be equally three-dimensional. But while the space depicted follows the rules of Renaissance perspective - the floor tilts up, there's a vanishing point, and so on-the picture is flat as a pancake. It is more like a drawing rendered so everything appears on the plane of the picture, and rather than be pulled in, we are pushed out. This must have something to do with the scale of the doors, the ever-present circle, the colour and the tilt of the fllor. Beyond that i can't say.

In any event this seems a good picture to end with. I would like to think that it epitomizes my work early and late. it has a door that lets you in. But once you are in, there's no way out.

 Catalogue "Lynne Cohen - Faux Indices" - Exhibition at Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal - from February 7 to April 28, 2013 / Lynne Cohen & François LeTourneux (Page 65)