What do we do when we make a portrait of someone?
We do not capture a face — we hold onto a bond.

Lou Cohen’s drawings do not seek to faithfully represent bodies. They grasp something else: a presence, a way of being, what remains of someone in another’s gaze. The portrait becomes an affective trace, a form of relation that persists even as the bond has shifted, altered, or broken. These figures often belong to a close circle, to a generation that constantly observes, documents, and stages itself. Here, friendship no longer belongs solely to the realm of intimacy: it becomes a mode of appearance. We photograph ourselves, we narrate ourselves, we produce images to keep others close, to extend their presence.
As Hélène Giannecchini writes, “Collective experiences are inseparable from a reflection on solitude; one must be oneself in order to share one’s life with others” (1). Lou Cohen’s images unfold within this condition: they do not seek to reduce distance, but to sustain it as the very structure of the bond, from which it becomes possible to see and to enter into relation. The portrait does not abolish this distance; it works through it, making it the very site of the relationship. To portray a friend, then, is also to shift them into another space, to prolong the bond by giving it a form that resists time.
In the Divine Comedy (2), Dante moves through the realm of the dead while still alive. He advances among frozen figures, condemned to repeat the same gestures, caught in a stretched, unresolved temporality. This singular position — being there without fully belonging to that world — sheds light on Lou Cohen’s images, where the Divine Comedy is notably placed in mise en abyme in the work “Regarde”. Her figures, too, seem to inhabit this in-between: they pose, wait, repeat, as though something prevents them from leaving the scene. Time dilates, gestures recur, and the image becomes less a passage than a place of lingering.
With “Infinite Scroll”, this experience shifts into the flow of digital images. On the screen of a drawn phone, narratives and fragments of existence unfold endlessly: love, breakups, excesses of language, sentences too full, too sincere, too late. Attempts to speak through the image: everything passes, everything follows, everything fades. In this flow, relationships quickly disappear, while images persist — though in unstable form. They retain traces of attachment, absence, sometimes even fantasy, becoming sites where affects settle and replay. Against this continuous circulation, Lou Cohen’s drawings slow the gaze, tighten the frame, immobilize bodies, and suspend time. They hold together presence and absence, as if representing someone were already a way of accepting their partial loss.

Perhaps this is what Lou Cohen does:
to make something still exist, for a moment longer, even as it is already gone.

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(1) Hélène Giannecchini, Un désir démesuré d’amitié, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 2019.
(2) Dante Alighieri, La Divine Comédie, trans. Jacqueline Risset, Paris, Flammarion, 1985.

Text by | Ulysse Feuvrier & Thomas Havet