Zeal Artwork

Aaron Benjamin Cohen’s practice operates in the space between abstraction and figuration, where images hover at the threshold of recognition and meaning is produced through erosion, accumulation, and restraint. Working across painting and constructed surfaces, Cohen treats the image as a site of pressure rather than representation—an arena where systems of power, surveillance, labor, belief, and intimacy register indirectly through material decisions. His work often begins with latent or peripheral imagery—figures, vehicles, architectural fragments, or aerial viewpoints—but resists legibility, allowing forms to emerge only to be destabilized or withheld. This refusal of completion mirrors the ethical conditions he interrogates: distance as a mode of control, visibility as a form of violence, and abstraction as both protection and erasure. Color functions not as expression but as structure—layered, muted, or imposed—to test how authority enters a surface and whether it can be absorbed without resolution. Cohen’s paintings do not narrate events; they hold conditions. Meaning is not illustrated but earned through material negotiation, inviting viewers into a slowed encounter where ambiguity is not a lack of clarity, but the work’s primary intelligence.