THE SOUL'S HOUSE

Courtyards, those spaces in which life passed and to which rooms looked, where the eves of Christmas and New Year the family gathered around long tables. Up above was the sky with the Southern Cross. There used to be wisterias and flowerpots with geraniums.
Now courtyards no longer exist. Those painted by Natalia Kohen speak of that absence which she replaces with question marks, memories, her own soul... Natalia's courtyards are self-portraits and at the same time confessions. Since the night I saw these paintings in her small studio I knew Natalia conveyed me a message, an enigma hidden behind her unrelenting simplicity and one which now I try to make out. First contradiction: Natalia hides more than what she shows us. It is the portrait of a luminous soul assuming this world's contradictions and absences without no shadows of despairing anguish. Natalia knows that stairs lead to impossible places, to the uncertain destiny of our lives. Those flowerpots with geraniums are now small plants from a lost paradise trying to cover, as Oriental rugs do, the walls that let light go through. An interior inhabited by enchanted birds that are neither ducks, nor chicken, nor peacocks, nor herons. Secret spectral symbols. High walls, with only few windows, and at the far end a little door with decorated grills, view point from which we see the sacred place in perspective. The sky, blue. From an outer space I cannot imagine. What there is beyond Natalia's courtyards, what there is outside of them, I know it is neither town nor countryside. Perhaps that blue is only a yearning. The light those walls receive doesn't come from the sun. The transparent weightless shadows they project deny darkness. Birds with wings, birds that do not fly, that lack volume and weight, that can only shift in the magic cross-sectioned floor board, where the ritual, the game, the riddle of fate is decided.

With few means Natalia tells all this and even more. A cool pencil line, always the same, drawn with a rule and a pair of compasses, delimits spaces rather than it draws forms. This relentless line concealing all sentiment is not disturbed by any chiaroscuro. Natalia doesn't appeal to strong projected shadows nor does she model those symbols that are the very figures she represents. Watercolour used with extreme economy, without visible brush strokes. Superposed brushes that faintly dye the paper. Some green, a bit of red, a blue rectangle, nothing more. Because Natalia does not want to impose her message on us. She simply is there, with diaphanous luminosity showing us her soul's house.

Guillermo Roux