Imprints of absence About the works of David Cohen François Ansermet Masks, canvases, sculptures, casts, but also leather, olive This is what gives a unity to the diversity of his produc- Cohen›s perspective is to give life to these traces, to find wood, jute bags, those used by the post office, bronze, tions: enabling us to encounter them as infinite varia- their shape, to make an impression of it, to wrap their ceramics, bones, lianas, or steel, to name but a few of the tions as on the same theme. contours, to grasp their life beyond what rest. To revive ways and materials at play: David Cohen’s works are di- what is no longer, to me this seems to be David Cohen’s verse, his techniques are plural, his effects are surprising. David Cohen’s works revolve around the tension be- perspective in his poetic works, which are indeed the tween loss and memory. Between traces and footprints, it fabrication of life from different inanimate materials. Something seems to insist through repetitions, changes, is the loss that torments his works. But that›s also what variations, as we say of musical variations. Something ? gives them their momentum. He finds life in the object, This doesn’t happen by itself. Beyond memory and its What? A thing ? The Thing - «das Ding» - in the sense he gives life to lost objects. David Cohen runs after the footprints, joy is there first and foremost: it is what is of Freud in his Sketch, when he brings up this term to trace: that is what gives life to his most evident in his productions - as in his personality 1 designate what is distinct from any object . The Thing creations. for those who know him. A certain exaltation, far from lies beyond perception, it points towards what is incompre- convention, free of codes, including those of his other hensible, elusive and unassimilable in the object 2. This is why his quest is never ending, like memory, profession, that of professor of child and adolescent which always reveals the infinity of what could have psychiatry. Traces left by the experience, traces of the object, traces been lost, of what could have disappeared forever, which, of absence: that’s what remains in memory. The memory perhaps, has even been forgotten. Faced with disappear- This joy is what allows the transmission. And that is 34 is made of mnemic traces, that is to say, a profusion of ance, in the face of oblivion, there is no other solution also what is transmitted. It is passion to transmit that 35 absences always present. What is no longer will always than creation. We create from loss, forgetfulness, ab- bring together his art, his teaching and his clinical work. be. What constitutes memory is what is no more. This is sence, even if we show the absence present in what we The challenge is to pass on what escapes, including what the paradox of memory. It is also the paradox of David show. What the course of his work reveals is that we do cannot be captured through representation: to catch Cohen’s works which turns what has disappeared or – not find the object: we find it, but it is always another up urgently, with insistence, to capture its imprint, by in the process of disappearing – into footprints. These object. Hence the insistence of series, pictorial or sculp- any means whatsoever, to make visible the invisible, the imprints of life beyond the object, of the object’s inertia tural, that he composes. life in all things – by elevating every object, everything pursues through him a journey beyond what it is. Thus remain, every trace, to the dignity of the Thing. Make this work leads whoever encounters it beyond what is Through his work as an artist, what happens is the the imprint of the Thing. Give an appearance to what is shown, beyond the objects exhibited. To elevate the temptation of life beyond loss: everything happens as beyond what is lost, give it substance, realize the ap- object to the dignity of the Thing, it is indeed the work if David Cohen was trying to revive what has been pearance in substance, preserve its memory: such is the of sublimation: it is moreover the definition that Lacan lost, what has become inaccessible, to what is dead. To perspective of David Cohen around an object still lost gives, building from the Freudian Thing, this “beyond find the imprint of life, to make memory come alive, to but always to be found, unendingly. object” that conceals the object. An object that must be animate the inanimate, to give life to matter, to bring out found, an object that is thought to be lost but “which the life, whether it is through a canvas or a vegetal left- 1. « What we call things (Dinge) are remnants of judg- has never really been lost, even though it is essentially over. Bring a dead tree to life and have it carry another ment »: Sigmund Freud, Sketch of a Psychology (Entwurf einer 3 Psychology), trans. S. Hommel et al., Toulouse, Érès, 2011, p. 91. a matter of finding it” . This is perhaps what the work life. To make traces come to life, through footprints, 2. « Das Ding » is indeed defined by Freud as a non-assimila- of memory does: to find what has not been lost beyond making them visible, molding them: this is the work of ble part, distinct from the known part of the object, cf. Ibid, p.147. what is no more. One could say that David Cohen, be- memory that David Cohen devotes himself to, reviving 3. Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, Livre VII, « L’éthique de la tween traces and imprints, exposes the objects of memo- what has been lost, to show life beyond death, beyond psychanalyse », 1959-60, Seuil, Paris, 1986, p. 72. ry: multiple objects, various, combined, recombined, lost, abandoned remains. Giving a memory of forgetfulness, found, which each in their own way exposes this Enig- beyond oblivion. matic Thing that escapes us. François Ansermet psychoanalyst, Honorary Professor of A trace is what the object leaves once gone elsewhere, Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, University of Geneva and The impression left by the works of David Cohen is like the footprint of Friday in the sand. For Robinson University of Lausanne, Member of the National Consul- that, through them, he tries to capture this elusive, to Crusoe, this is the sign that there was someone who left tative Committee of Ethics in Paris, Vice President of the get the impression, to graze the memory, to capture the somewhere else, who was alive even though maybe he is Agalma Foundation in Geneva. For years, he has dialogued trace through painting, sometimes carving it, or wrap- no more. And indeed, the memory is made of traces of with artists and performers about changes in society and ping it, grasping its shape, through a material, by the what has been. Thus memory is continuity and disconti- human condition, but also on how these changes occur (by the effect of a color. Whatever the means used, what he aims nuity. Is a memory trace a sign of something that is no work of memory? Of chance?). His last dialogue with Prune for is the imprint of absence, the presence of absence. longer or something that is always? In any case, David Noury in Serendipity is a profound testimony of his commit- ment with artists.