De acordo com estudos sobre a capacidade de atenção humana, acredita-se amplamente que o tempo médio máximo dedicado ao consumo de um “conteúdo” nos dias de hoje não ultrapassa seis segundos. Sem entrar em questionamentos sobre o tipo de regressão cultural implícita em designar tudo simplesmente como “conteúdo” — de um GIF a um filme ou a uma obra literária —, a prática de Raúl Cordero tem explorado, ao longo dos últimos vinte anos, o que significa criar arte para o ser humano contemporâneo: alguém que carece de plena capacidade de atenção e vive num estado permanente de distração, olhando constantemente para algo enquanto pensa noutra coisa. Encontrar beleza dentro dessa condição e devolvê-la, transformada em belas-artes, ao próprio ser humano que a habita constitui o tema central da sua obra.
Pinturas para bater o recorde de 6 segundos é o título da primeira exposição de Raúl Cordero na Galeria Fernando Santos, no Porto. Nessas pinturas, realizadas entre 2019 e 2024, é possível observar a sobreposição de elementos como texto, imagens e formas geométricas, todos meticulosamente executados à mão por meio de técnicas tradicionais de pintura. O resultado é um conjunto de obras que provoca uma poderosa reflexão social, preservando a beleza como valor essencial — condição necessária para a sobrevivência da nossa civilização.
Pinturas para bater o recorde de 6 segundos (solo show) Fernando Santos Gallery, Portugal Jan-Mar, 2026
Arte lento para multitudes rápidas es la tercera muestra personal del artista, en una institución pública en España, en este caso, exhibiendo tres bloques de trabajos recientes. Una selección de once pinturas realizadas en el último lustro (siete de las cuales formaron parte de su muestra personal en el Museo Nacional Palacio de Bellas Artes de La Habana en el año 2019), tres video-instalaciones de tres momentos específicos de su producción audiovisual (dos de ellas inéditas) y un espacio de conexión donde cohabitan una instalación de luces con piezas de videoarte y registros gráficos (que van desde fotografías digitales hasta NFTs), que nos aportaran una perspectiva crítica de cómo piensa el artista, cómo ejecuta su trabajo y cómo lo ensambla como un conglomerado de sensaciones y dudas, aciertos y juegos azarosos donde la belleza y lo poético siempre han rondado.
En un tiempo donde nos pasamos la vida mirando las pantallas, el artista pretende distraernos (mediante la lectura que lleva un tiempo neuromotriz más lento que la visión de imágenes siempre tratas por la mano del artista defoncándolas) nos obliga a detenernos de esa distracción, obligándonos a leer, descifrar, darle un significa otro la lo que vemos; recordándonos el papel sanador del arte como espacio emocional, lugar donde se halla lo perdido, donde se reconforta el espíritu, donde se libera la vista con mecanismos donde el reordenamiento de las cosas las embellece, aunque menos sea menos o más y donde la presencia de recurso post-moderno del tempo, está desacelerado, ralentizado, como mismo lo está la meditación, el conocerse a si mismo, o el estar en paz. Un bucle que de alguna manera lo convierte en un resistente, un disidente, a pesar de sus Un neobarroco rondar, siempre en elipsis, mediante el cual nos pide detenernos.
Como si el artista nos dijera: “Para. Respira hondo. Mira esto”.
Arte lento para multitudes rápidas (solo show) Museo MEIAC, España 2022
Video by Igor Sterpin for Tucandeira Films, produced by Fernando Santos Gallery about Raúl Cordero's first solo exhibition at the gallery, from January 17th until March 21st 2026
Pinturas para bater o recorde de 6 segundos (solo show) Fernando Santos Gallery Porto, Jan-Mar, 2026
Not so long ago, a Latino artist-or LATINX, to go with the times- in his early 50s began to notice how life was changing dramatically. Humans had started relying on computers for almost everything, even when they were required to verify that they were not robots. Passing this verification was not only a human victory over the machine’s authority, but it also brought happiness, a new kind of happiness. So, he wanted to make paintings about things like the absurdity of an “internet challenge”, a “vision board” or a “drop,” and question why everyone constantly looked at a small screen in their hands while doing other things.
When creating these works, the artist also used computers, discovered artificial intelligence, and enjoyed the freedom of not having to make images believable anymore, like glimpsing remote and dream like places from his beloved Tropics. He also received and replied messages, sketched his works using a software, photographed the process and emailed it to friends. This technology made everything he wanted to do easier, but at the same time, having so many possibilities distracted him too much from his purpose. His goal was to raise awareness of how much we have given in to the artificial, but no one seemed to care. Until he realized that he had no choice but to keep doing what he and everyone else were doing all day long: talking to computers
Talking to Computers (solo show) Fredric Snitzer Gallery Miami, Aug-Oct, 2024
Una mente distraída no se enfoca. Es invadida por secuencias infinitas de interferencias: mensajes de texto, demandas fisiológicas, preocupaciones, temperatura inadecuada, ansiedades; un largo etcétera interrumpe eventualmente la atención y la dispersa, distrayéndola. Precisa desarrollar la capacidad de concentrarse para aprehender y establecer memoria. La ruta crítica de Cordero entabla una arqueología de la mente: mirar lo formal, pensar lo textual, y la sumatoria, cíclicamente codificada, contemplativa, intelectiva, busca devolvernos a nuestros orígenes, apreciando la sabiduría de los antiguos y su manera de entender y estudiar el universo en sintonía con la Naturaleza.
Art for the distracted mind (solo show) Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes Havana, 2019 - 2020
HEAVEN IS A PLACE IN THE MIND is a collection all about light. Similar to traditional painting techniques, Cordero uses lightsource as a focal point to compare euphoric feelings to our societal dream of being the greatest, the fastest or the richest. With our accessibility to technology, we have adapted a “grass is always greener on the other side” mentality; always searching for the best and not so much existing in the present. Cordero’s finale powerfully retorts that the real heaven is all about the state of your mind.
Cordero’s “style” is more than the stroke of a brush or a preferred color palette; it’s an anti-style. He uses anti-typography, the infamous gold-dotted symbols, to create a language that is cryptic in its message. Contrasted by the blurred images, there is a sense of juxtaposed embossment with the anti-typography, evoking a stronger focus when perceived. Through the evolving digital era, people tend to accurately focus if there is a sense of multitasking; Raúl Cordero’s work is the epitome of this belief. With his trickery at play, overstimulated images and enigmatic signage causes the viewer to not only intently focus but to take a moment and feel his words instead of computing them.
“Art isn’t a message, it’s an emotion. If the emotion isn’t there, then the message or idea won’t be either.”
Heaven is a place in the mind (solo show) Richard Taittinger Gallery New York, Mar-Apr, 2022
Video by THE OLYMPIA PROJECT for their ARTSY exhibition Matter Of The Mind, Raúl Cordero explains ideas behind his work "Embedded Poem" as well as his art practice in general.
Interview for Matter of the Mind Project
Raúl says that images no longer carry credibility or any information about reality, that after artificial intelligence, they are just images. A rose is a rose is a rose. And in the same way, we can have a view of the Alps from the tropics, or talk about freedom while looking at an apocryphal skyline. THE PROMPT increasingly conditions and mediates various aspects of life. Three distinct paintings, same questioning.
The way we create and store memories has changed. It is no longer an old photo album lovingly kept by the family in an intimate space; now they are just public domain data, zeros and ones seen by your "friends" and "followers" one day and the next they are nothing more than information for the algorithm. OUTSOURCING NOSTALGIA —what a beautiful expression— describes the phenomenon and is one of the paintings in this exhibition. And well, if there are people who hire others to hug them, what is strange about hiring a service to delegate memories?
In THE VERIFIED EFFECT I and II, there is a disturbing element: both because of how culturally, distant those Asian characters are from us, and because of the ambiguity of the gesture of those women whose expressions are unclear—whether they are laughing, moaning, or crying. These are seductive, attractive paintings, at the same time strange and disturbing. Like when a robot checks that you are not another robot and a blue checkmark next to your profile picture proves you are who you say you are. 30 seconds of dopamine. Or 2 hours and 23 minutes, which is the average daily time a user spends on social networks. Immediate gratification and chronic depression. What do we understand by happiness today?
Today, life happens at supersonic speeds, and the sense of urgency torments us all the time. Events push against each other, overlap, and intermingle to the point of confusion. This is what happens in INCIDENTE DOMÉSTICO I (Message Spying) and II (Connection Lost), where we do not quite know what is happening, we only see the interior of an elegant living room, the night, and the fire. Is it a hearth fire or the bonfire of discord? Is that lost connection a human connection or an internet connection? Which one is more relevant?
We know that bad news are the most viral ones. Disaster and violence generate a fascinating morbid curiosity (very functional for mass control). Add to this the growing popularity of social networks as sources of information, and what do we have left? The baroque and blurry spectacle of everyday life.
In this new body of work exhibited, there are two peculiarities: on one hand, the aim is to make the pictorial gesture visible, to show dripping, un-erased pencil lines, to highlight the accident. On the other hand, the recurrence of images created with AI. Where before the source was "real", today the artifice is double: the image is created with Artificial Intelligence and then painted.
In all this commentary on today's “brave new world”, these paintings open an ancestral debate: the eternal tension between truth and lie, between fiction and reality. Without taking sides as criticism or apology, they even question the validity of the question, the point of debating whether this or that is true or false. And beyond that, the meaning of artistic representation itself, questioning how useful it is to continue painting today. In any case, the underlying principle of these pieces is the same that has long guided Raúl: to find beauty in everyday life and return it to the world in the form of art.
The strange world increasingly tends towards a happy world. Between José Alfredo Jiménez and Aldous Huxley, the present. This exhibition is an essay on contemporary life. A collection where mystery and fiction intertwine in a narrative that is at times bleak, but above all, always beautiful. Deliberately beautiful. And if you want to know about my past / It is necessary to tell another lie / I will tell you that I came from a strange world / That I do not know pain / that I succeeded in love / And that I have never cried.
Un Mundo Raro (solo show) Galería Estéreo Monterrey, May-Aug, 2024
As technology advances, we grow increasingly bombarded with information. To thoroughly digest the level of information available online would be an overwhelming, and nearly impossible, undertaking. Consequently, rather than meticulously sifting through digital media, we instead mindlessly scroll.
About two decades ago, a utopic virtual imitation of the world started to be created by computer visionaries and later contributed to by almost every human on the planet. To this day, what looked as a computer joke has become a digital layer that overlaps everything, proving to be very accurate, attractive and efficient enough to modify life and solve our everyday problems.
We probably won’t know how to live anymore without the help of this digital layer. Today we live assisted by personal intelligent devices we carry in our pockets and spend more time talking to robots than to other human beings. These robots continuously force us to prove that we are human, and we answer for the sake of advancing the digital navigation, and therefore the navigation of life itself. Interacting purely with reality would not take us very far today, at least to the high efficiency standards of the performance society we have created.
Reality is the New Spam is a series of -both physical and digital- works that amuse the boost from the real to the virtual. The versatile in harmony with the rigid. Ourselves versus our social avatars. The satellite locations overlapping the landscapes. The blurred next to the “hard edge”. A lifelike image against a vectorized field. The innate touching the man-made. Somehow a meditative depiction of our present days.
Reality is the New Spam (solo show) Wizard Gallery Milan, Oct-Nov, 2022
La Banda Gris and Editorial Turner present a video about the second monograph devoted to the work of artist Raúl Cordero. Published in 2025, with 304 pages and texts by Barry Schwabsky, Dan Cameron, Christian Viveros-Fauné, Chiara Ianeselli, Deyan Sudjic and Cy Schnabel
Monograph Heaven Is a Place in the Mind
Todo es texto, imagen, reverberación, sonido hueco, signos sin misterios, transparencias. Tautología, todo es copia y repetición, carrusel infinito. Fragmento sígnico que sobre sí mismo se precipita y se amasija. Se hace cuerpo, memoria.
Volviendo al eco. Sobre esta idea de la vibración, toda la obra de Raúl Cordero, aún sin él saberlo, se estructura desde un sistema modélico que pareciese ideado por Severo Sarduy. Todo su trabajo se me antoja como una retombeé, un viaje de ida y vuelta que se encrespa y escapa de sí mismo una y otra vez, un hálito barroco sostenido en el aire, intentando atraparlo mediante el ritual de ralentización que es ejercicio del arte, como herramienta reflexiva y contemplativa, dotada de saberes y sensorialidad.
Quizás porque sobre las ausencias, va gran parte de su trabajo. Las ausencias para quienes comprenden la música en su totalidad, son silencios, vacíos a aprovechar, darle un sonido vacuo, es también una reverberación, mucho más en los tiempos cuánticos. Preguntémosle a los astrofísicos. Con ellos, dialoga, Raúl, reverberando. Vibrando como ellos, de gota en gota, átomo en átomo, partícula a partícula que cae sobre el soporte plano.
Spanglish Drama (solo show) Galería Artízar Tenerife, Dic 2021-Ene 2022
Short documentary piece produced by Times Square Arts and Raúl Cordero Studio about the art installation THE POEM by Raúl Cordero in collaboration with Barry Schwabsky at Times Square New York during the months of April and May 2022.
The Poem. 2022 Times Square, New York Site-specific work commissioned by Times Square Arts
Raúl Cordero’s paintings are rooted in an awareness that the medium of film, with all its possibilities, has a far greater effect on present-day perceptions than images like photographs have. Consider, for instance, the immediacy of the internet. Indeed, video art was an important focus of Cordero’s work for some ten years, before he shifted his attention to painting instead.
The paintings presented here, under the title Transient Poetry, reflect this approach with their flickering, streakily blurred appearance redolent of individual images captured on TV screens. At the same time, they also play with, and within, the tradition of painting, which can only ever show a single image, no matter how much that image might contain.
It is precisely this aspect that Cordero typically explores, further underpinning it with added comments and statements which lend the images a self-reflexive subtext. And it is here that the poetic element comes into play, relativising the image once more while at the same time defining what the picture actually says and, with that, what its topic is – namely, the relativity and transience of a passing thought – in spite of, or perhaps precisely because of, the visual references to historical paintings or other, older visual sources. Cordero thus highlights a much broader cultural context. For example, by invoking the landscape in paintings of the seventeenth century Dutch artist Meindert Hobbema as an enduring theme in art. This play on visual references is evident, for instance, in his work Untitled (Curators pick…-after Hobbema), 2015, in which Cordero uses a succession of three images to parallel the tradition of the tryptich.
Cordero’s paintings are based on a fundamentally conceptual approach and, yet, at the same time, they reflect his love of melancholy, introspective painting. His interest in the point at which a work actually begins, and the processes and ideas it undergoes on the way to becoming an artwork, is expressed in the descriptive annotations and multilayered references to other media and artworks, which the frame of reference in his painting keeps in constant motion, without end.
Transient Poetry (solo show) Mai 36 Galerie Zurich, May-Jun 2015
Watch impressions of the unveiling for Raúl Cordero's piece THE POEM, (featuring Barry Schwabsky) at Times Square New York. April 8th - May 6th 2022. Commissioned by Times Square Arts, NY.
The Poem. 2022 (Unveiling) Times Square, New York Site-specific work commissioned by Times Square Arts
En WORDS ARE WIND / LE PAROLE SONO VENTO entonces, ésta se queda ahí... liviana e intrascendentemente en un stand by... en una quietud que puede dejarnos más que nada en la duda, en ese raro lugar mental del que nacen las preguntas y donde ninguna respuesta puede que sea certera.
Como si Cordero finalmente nos susurrase: Discrepa, ve a tu ritmo, no importa que seas lento en un universo vertiginoso. Aprende o nunca fluirás. O si sabes, entonces sabes que no tienes fluir, porque fluir -a día de hoy- significa “dejarse llevar”, arrastrarse por la marea. Así que mejor, juega a la contra, siempre… a la contra.
Disentir es la única opción inteligente, “pintar es la única opción realmente de vanguardia”, como dijera el gran Tuymans. La pintura siempre será un registro de nuestra existencia imperecedero, más allá de los tiempos veloces que vivimos, más allá de las palabras, porque su atemporal parsimonia ahí está, desafiante y ahí estará latente y patentada como registro de lo que somos, hemos sido y seremos. Desde donde nos regala un extraño mutismo que tartamudea un poco para que pensemos que habla, y al afinar el oído y escucharla o intentar leerla… caigamos en la trampa de su belleza visual, aquella que a través de la mirada nos hipnotiza. Su mejor arma, puede que el único enunciado que importe, lo demás es hojarasca, pura hojarasca.
Words are wind (solo show) FL Gallery Milan, Mar-May 2017
Dutch art curator and collector Xantha Berger walks us through a whole room devoted to the work of Raúl Cordero at the Singer Laren Museum exhibition Cuban Art Now. The Netherlands, 2017
Cuban Art Now Raúl Cordero Museum TV
RAUL CORDERO "Transient Poetry" Video by Mai 36 Galerie
Video by Mai 36 Galerie about Raúl Cordero's Transient Poetry Solo Exhibition. 2015.
Video documentation by URBALA of the show PLACEBO, by Raúl Cordero and Omar Barquet at the Palace of Medicine (former Inquisition Palace) in Mexico City. April to June 2019.
PLACEBO
Raul Cordero VIRTUAL SUMMER solo show at Mai 36 Galerie
Interviewed by Andrea Hinteregger de Mayo from Mai 36 Galerie, Raúl Cordero defines how his work is structured and the main ideas behind his conceptual, text-based paintings.
Video about the work process of Raúl Cordero made during the making of his exhibition ART FOR THE DISTRACTED MIND / ARTE PARA LA MENTE DISTRAÍDA at Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Havana, Cuba (2019-2020)
RAÚL CORDERO: ART FOR THE DISTRACTED MIND
As a start for a new series of videos, in this first episode of BEHIND AN ARTWORK, Raúl Cordero presents a new group of paintings titled “History of The Future”
Raúl Cordero: BEHIND THE ARTWORK. Episode 1 "History Of The Future"
In this second episode of BEHIND AN ARTWORK, Raúl Cordero tells the story behind his painting “You Know Who You Are And You Know What You Want”
Raúl Cordero: BEHIND THE ARTWORK. Episode 2 "You Know Who You Are and You Know What You Want"
In the third episode of BEHIND AN ARTWORK, Raúl Cordero explains the process of painting seen as a ritual, through the 31 days long process of of painting TODO EL MAMBO, TODO EL MUNDO (After Byrne), 2020
Raúl Cordero. BEHIND THE ARTWORK. Episode 3 "Painting As A Ritual"
In this fourth episode of BEHIND THE ARTWORK, Raúl Cordero tells about the personal story that originated his Vibration Paintings
Raúl Cordero. BEHIND THE ARTWORK. Episode 4 “Life Is More Important Than Art: The Vibration Paintings”
Raúl Cordero is interviewed by Luis Ivan Carbonell and Koko Axle at his home and studio in Mexico City for the Youtube Channel TITANES DEL ARTE Y EL DISEÑO
Titanes del Arte y el Diseño: RAUL CORDERO