Arick Cohen sALMEA
Arick was born in Los Angeles and has lived all over the world. At six his family made Aliyah to Israel; he came of age in the California desert and studied at UC San Diego, double-majoring in visual arts and art history.
During the pandemic he painted a painting a day for over 550 days. Under the moniker Moriartsy he worked in meticulous, photorealistic detail, opened a gallery show on Crosby Street in SoHo, and won three awards at Art Basel. Then a stranger showed him AI-generated images trained on his own paintings, and everything changed.
He pivoted to work no machine can duplicate: abstract, exaggerated, multi-material painting where the paint and brushstrokes are the point. He calls the series Emotional Brush, less pre-planned, more discovered in the moment. “Anybody can make an image. My goal is to make it feel like it came from a human hand and a human soul.”
SELECTED WORKS
Matriarch
2023 • Acrylic ink & Japanese black (sumi) ink on Canvas board
Size: 24 x 18 in.
Grandmother who was like a mother to me. My Savtah.
Patriarch
2023 • Acrylic ink & Japanese black (sumi) ink on Canvas board
Size: 24 x 18 in.
Grandfather who I never knew but was a war hero for the French Foreign Legion. My Sabba.
ARTIST STATEMENT
I painted my own hyper colorful photorealism style for years. I got good at it. I could disappear into a face and come out the other side with something that I termed Post Modern Pop Surrealism, and I though that was the achievement.
In 2022, on the last day of a huge show in SoHo called the “Warholics; Painting Based on Unreleased Photography of Andy Warhol”, a man walked up and showed me an image that looked like something I’d painted. He told me he’d trained an AI on my work and was selling it. Then he laughed and disappeared into the crowd. I went after him. I never found him. I was livid and distraught. And then I understood something: a machine can copy an image style. what it cannot do is leave evidence of a hand that was moving. So I stopped. These seventeen paintings are what came after - acrylic and Japanese sumi ink on canvas board, laid down fast, in single passes, no correction, no going back in. The brushstroke is not the way of arriving at a face. It is the face. Where the ink pools, where it runs dry, where the line hesitates and where it doesn’t — that is the entire record.
They were made during a family crisis. I wasn’t thinking. I let the brush go where the emotion took it, and I let it stay there. Some of these are my grandmother, my grandfather, my mother, myself. Others I know and am not naming, because the work no longer belong only to me once it’s on the wall — you ‘ll put your own faces there, and you should.
One of them is painted on Aqua board with sparkles worked into the surface. Those sparkles will fade and fall away over the years. That one is a self-portrait, and the material is doing what the subject does.
Nothing here can be regenerated. That’s not a limitation of the process. That’s the point.
— ARICK
CURRENT EXHIBITION
