The delicate refinement of the furniture and ornaments awakens intimate memories of colonial, political or religious violence, while he – or the fairy-like being he embodies – physically confronts history.

Steven Cohen’s work can take plastic or performative forms. His paintings and silkscreen prints are collages that bring together diverse iconographies, references to art history, religion, pop culture or a mismatched memory of social history. He also makes furniture, restoring and “augmenting” existing objects – ecstatic faces or phalluses on upholstery, horns extending a backrest, feathers licking an armrest, etc. For the creation of Boudoir, the artist has revisited the same visual art techniques he used in his early work. These pieces of furniture are often inspired by, or originate from, Art Nouveau or Liberty – eras in which eccentricity, the free imitation of natural or animal forms and extreme refinement were combined in the same object: chimerical pieces of furniture that are as delicate in their alchemy as they are provocative in their formal boldness. Eras in which the nascent technology of the first gramophones encouraged a flourishing spiritualism and communication with the dead. They were also times of triumphant colonialism, of the exhibition of human beings, of the over-exploitation of working-class labour for the benefit of a privileged bourgeois class; in South Africa, British domination was asserting itself through the massacre of Zulus and Boers (free French-Dutch farmers) and the first concentration camps, against a backdrop of gold rushes and stock market crises.

This is the thrust of Steven Cohen’s work: how refinement coexists and dialogues with horror, how it can simultaneously be its expression and its antidote.

The artist confronts social, racial and sexual oppression and the forces of exclusion of difference – those he knows and has lived through as a white, South African, Jewish and queer man: the memory of the genocide of the Jews, as well as the rejection of sexual difference, run through his entire body of work. He does not speak for others – for black women or the poor, for example. But his denunciation of the frameworks of patriarchy and oppressive powers – from his own point of view – resonates beyond his own situation, because it reveals culpable social structures, machinations and aporia. He speaks as a white man and as an artist, which he considers two privileged positions: a form of luxury that he makes a point of enjoying to the full, that is to say, without compromise and without condescension towards himself. This luxury is both that of elegance and of radicalism.

Ultimately, when he defines himself as queer, it is to mark less a category of belonging than an absence of assignment – he prefers to unsettle rather than assert. This is another essential aspect of his protean work: undoing assignations in order to reveal power plays and, at the same time, reopening up possibilities.

This undoing of assignments applies to himself as well as to his loved ones, to history, to artistic imagery (cultural or religious). Although Steven Cohen maintains an intense link with history of art (its representations and practices – religious and scholarly as well as popular and vernacular), with history (for example, through the venues he chooses for his public performances) and with death in general, it is never nostalgic or elegiac: on the contrary, he thus succeds in “losing the lost”, in preserving consciousness and memory in order to make the new appear.

The figures into which he transforms himself – strangely similar yet always different, and as light as the butterflies whose wings he dons – are at once graves and catalysts, anonymous alephs and sorcerers of the memory of the future.

Steven Cohen and the Transmutation of the Self and of History, by Eric Vautrin