Each of Raúl Cordero´s paintings is a visual adventure that explores the way we live and think in the contemporary world. Working with the traditions of figurative and geometrical abstract painting, Cordero incorporates his expansive knowledge of art history in layers of literary, philosophical, and pop culture references. Distortion and blurriness combine with hard-edge figures to, along with his technical proficiency, speak about the human experience in our hastened postmodern context.
Beyond the random choice of elements that make these pieces up, the truth is that a certain image jumps to the eye: the mountain. The mountain is a symbol of closeness to the divine, it´s the home of the gods, the union of heaven and earth. On it, silence is consecrated, the sacred is touched and one enters into self-oblivion. It´s the union with the whole, the transcendence. But here, there´s a twist in shape and color (on the one hand it looks like lava, on the other, like the magic hour; is it the announcing of a fall?), the mountains are now a distortion in the background, and it doesn’t matter what they once were: they have faded, they are now remote.
There is no longer access to the holy summit, to that moment of pause, of silence. The steadiness of the contemplative gaze nowadays becomes almost impossible. Faced with the noise of infinite options, in this hyperconnected world, just as in these paintings, the sacred peak fades, goes away. The background figure is sped up and simplified. We no longer see mountains here, but sharp, definitive rhombi, like a fragmented and ephemeral truth. The landscape has been updated.
Magela Garcés
FOCUS is presented regularly to highlight selected works from our production accompanied with observations by Magela Garcés.
