30 March – 28 May, 2017
Opening reception: 29 March 2017, 6 – 9 pm
Viale Sabotino, 22
20135-Milan
Federico Luger (FL GALLERY) is proud to present “Words are Wind / Le parole sono vento”, the first solo exhibition in Italy by the Cuban artist Raúl Cordero.
By means of recurring motives that he transforms and revisits, Cordero has created a universe of his own through his work, using computers and printing media to construct images that will finally become traditional oil paintings. Taking his deep knowledge of western tradition of painting as a frame of reference, his work constantly revolutionizes the pictorial process by relying on contemporary technological breakthroughs. He uses this technology to celebrate the grandiloquence of the most important and historically innovative medium in art history: Painting.
The relationship between what is apparently “old”, or “new” is also very important in Cordero’s work. We live in a time when, due to the rapid pace at which technology has been replacing science and intellectual rigor, something “new” appears every single day —even in art. “New” is not a value anymore; it is a daily condition. For this reason, Cordero focuses on the symbolism of the obsolete, of what is no longer “useful”, but rather exists only for its aesthetic and ethical importance. This also grounds his preference for painting –and its classical themes as landscapes, seascapes, architecture and portraits-, whose importance nowadays is also more symbolic than functional, given that the slow and obsessive way of creating a traditional painting is inconsistent with the speed at which images are “obtained” these days.
For this exhibition Raúl Cordero will present eight new paintings, depicting different open air situations, including Landscapes, Architecture, Sailboats, etc. The images, done in subdued colors, depict the cohabitation of both a deconstructed figuration (soft-edge) and abstract forms (hard-edge), as well as a very personal way of adding and overlapping texts referring to the daily experience of making art nowadays. These texts are pierced to semi-transparent elements that feign crystalline “windows”, distorting the classical figure-ground perception. As a result, his work connects the figurative pictorial language with its subsequent metamorphosis into abstraction and the spirit of modernism. While at the same time, it questions how visual language has given way to textual information in contemporary art.
Raúl Cordero was born in 1971 in Havana, Cuba and currently lives and works in Mexico City. He studied Fine Arts at the San Alejandro Academy and Design at ISDI in his hometown, to further pursue his studies at the Graphic Media Development Center and the Rijksakademie Van Beeldende Kunsten in the Netherlands. In the recent years, Cordero has focused his work on the new paths and developments of Painting.
His work can be seen at prestigious public collections all over the world, including the National Museum of Modern Art – Center Pompidou in Paris, France; the Museum of Contemporary Art of Los Angeles County (LACMA); the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA); The Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego and the Fort Lauderdale Art Museum in the United States; the National Museum of Fine Arts in Havana, Cuba, the Stedelijk Museum for Actuele Kunst (SMAK) in Ghent, Belgium; The Atlantic Center for Modern Art and the Ibero-American Museum of Contemporary Art (MEIAC) in Spain, among many others.
This exhibition is made in a collaboration with Mai 36 Galerie, in Zurich, Switzerland.
