Raúl Cordero Studio

Official updates on the work of Raúl Cordero

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    • Raúl Cordero: An Art of Transition
    • Raúl Cordero and The Measure of Art
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    • New Rules of the Game: Painting As Process
    • Being Raúl Cordero: Aporias of Painting
    • Raúl Cordero: Seeing it my way
    • Painting… and why not?
    • La pintura de Raúl Cordero o la sacralidad de la imagen
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THE POEM at Times Square, New York City. U.S.A. (solo)

8 April, 2022

In the center of Times Square’s urban landscape, Cuban-born artist Raúl Cordero creates an unexpected oasis — a 20-foot tower covered in a cascade of mountain laurel hosting an illuminated poem inside. The landscaped structure is designed to narrow the sensory overload of Times Square to a concentrated line of vision, drawing the eye to a patch of open sky and the words of the poem overhead. Playing with the architecture and energy of Times Square, Cordero offers us a respite from the attention economy in the form of poetry and nature.

Written by poet and educator Barry Schwabsky and created specifically for Cordero’s Times Square installation, the characters of the poem take shape through glowing bulbs of black light affixed to the interior of the foliage. The structure of the letters forces viewers to linger longer to receive the message — emblematic of Cordero’s ongoing investigation into effects of the digital age on the human mind, specifically our waning ability to focus and the increasing urge to relentlessly multitask.

calm
silence
rolls
deftly
through
so much
clamor
roar
echo un
heard

Cordero’s project is also inspired by and dedicated to fellow Cuban and poet Reinaldo Arenas, an exile of the Cuban government who battled AIDS which led to death by suicide in 1990. As a child, Arenas would write poems while sitting in a tree, a pastime that inspired the height and foliage feel of Cordero’s installation. Arenas spent his final years as a creative in New York City, living only two blocks away from THE POEM’s location.

“It’s difficult to create meaningful art for people in an era when their attention is scattered across so many mediums and technologies simultaneously. THE POEM seeks to stop time, reminding us that humans also have the capacity to invest in one thing at a time — like listen to ‘the secret dialogue of trees’ (as put poetically by Reinaldo Arenas) and read a poem, even when standing in the center of Times Square.”
— Raúl Cordero

In conjunction with the project, Cordero will be presenting text-based video works across digital billboards, and free public programming on the ground featuring New York City’s diverse poetry community. Throughout the run of the exhibition, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, Paolo Javier, Barry Schwabsky, and PEN America will each curate evenings of poetry readings and live performance celebrating THE POEM and local poets.

THE POEM coincides with Cordero’s solo show at Richard Taittinger Gallery, HEAVEN IS A PLACE IN THE MIND, on view through April 24.

THE POEM is commissioned by Times Square Arts with generous support from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and in part through support from Morgan Stanley, the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature, and public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

See at TIMES SQUARE ARTS home page

 

SELECTED PRESS

Time Out New York

Broadway World

Artnet News

The Architects Newspaper

Agencia EFE

Secret NYC

Announcing THE POEM at Times Square, New York

25 March, 2022

We are pleased to announce THE POEM, the newest text based art installation by Raúl Cordero in collaboration with Barry Schwabsky, commissioned by Times Square Arts in New York City. THE POEM will unveil in Times Square on April 8th and will be on view until May 4th, 2022.

HEAVEN IS A PLACE IN THE MIND at Richard Taittinger Gallery, New York (solo)

10 March, 2022

Richard Taittinger Gallery is pleased to announce the New York representation of Raúl Cordero (b. 1971) and present his first New York solo exhibition in almost fifteen years. This exhibition, HEAVEN IS A PLACE IN THE MIND, is based on 22 works (16 paintings, 2 installations and 4 NFTs and 1 limited edition RTG print) that demonstrate one’s understanding of our current society and how we obtain information through distracted elements and sated visuals.

We asked Cordero to tell us about his thrilling new work and upcoming exhibition:

“Every era has its own poetry. I am particularly interested in the poetry of this current era, where I live. We all write and publish constantly these days and type what we want in search boxes from food to transportation to dreams to sex — are we all poets for this? For me, this newfound poetry expands into hashtags, acronyms and gender pronouns; all tools that we use to communicate with each other. It brings curiosity towards platforms, such as Google, that have indexed life through text, according to its own algorithms and interests. Through the works in this exhibition, I recount TALES FROM AN INDEXED WORLD, as well as my own assumption that today’s REALITY IS THE NEW SPAM. Finding out in the end that HEAVEN IS A PLACE IN THE MIND, which is probably the closest I have been able to attain a set conclusion with my contemplative attitude towards life.”

This exhibition is structured in three sections starting with the anterior of the gallery, TALES FROM AN INDEXED WORLD. A series of paintings that explore how our world has become indexed through algorithms and platforms such as Google. As an amusing experiment, Cordero uses his search results from typing “THE” into a search engine to create his potent yet poetic text within the paintings. REALITY IS THE NEW SPAM, is the second series of collections located in the gallery’s mezzanine. A collection of square framed black and white filtered paintings that lay dimensionless underneath voluminous and vivid shapes. These paintings are Cordero’s understanding of our new reality — a hyperstimulated and highly active environment. It is his impression of an “obstructed reality” where you cannot clearly see what’s behind the shapes but the painting isn’t fully blocked either. Lastly, HEAVEN IS A PLACE IN THE MIND is a collection all about light. Similar to traditional painting techniques, Cordero uses light source 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. The series is intentionally placed in the rear side of the gallery.

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 he 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.”

Cordero uses “three ranges” to perform his poetry: (a) wide-open spaces such as scenic landscapes, (b) things and people such as lighting, interior, and portraits, (c) assimilated versions of quantum space such as ether and energetic vibration; paired all together they blend the conceptional with the technical. His technique extends homage to spatial awareness, as humans, we tend to give attention to what we see and little to what we don’t see. Cordero curiously plays with the oscillating relationships of communication: image and text, positive space and negative space, film and video, ether and electricity, traditional and modern.

While manipulating images, mischievously sculpting acronym fixtures, and painting with contemporary colors, Cordero represents the current state of reality. After an invitation to publish a collection with Nifty Gateway in 2020, he started to produce NFT artworks on platforms, Nifty Gateway and Rarible, which are a one-of-a-kind virtual collectibles. In 2021, Cordero started making NFT artworks for Richard Taittinger Gallery. His NFTs connect his work in painting, video and installations with his lifelong digital production. Raúl Cordero states, “Art should document the zeitgeist of its time” and he has successfully done so.

Alongside HEAVEN IS A PLACE IN THE MIND, Raúl Cordero’s is having his first solo interactive exhibition, THE POEM, with Barry Schwabsky in Times Square on March 24 – April 24, 2022, in collaboration with Rockefeller Foundation and The Cuban Artists Fund. The public art installation is dedicated to the memory of Cuban Writer Reinaldo Arenas, a poet and rebel to the Cuban government.

See at Richard Taittinger Gallery’s home page

Raúl Cordero: “Spanglish Drama” at Galeria Artizar. Tenerife, Spain (solo)

17 December, 2021

See at Galeria Artizar’s Home Page

See at Artsy

SPANGLISH DRAMA (or a way of being unitive according to Raúl Cordero)

To Chic Corea (RIP). Listening to your Spain

If anything has the ability to mutate, it’s language. Through linguistic drifts and deviations, languages are continually being enriched through a process of mixing that generally derives from the transgression or colonisation of borders. Rarely does this occur without violence, but when it does, it is through a process of sedimentation, as layer settles upon layer.

It would be interesting to return to this deconstructing notion of what we are through the understanding that we are all mixtures and blends, now that it has become so fashionable to think in terms of an essentialist, racialised identity, one that is ultimately stereotyped, socially-agenced, polyglot and decolonial; now that “being from the Tropics” (from the “global south”) is in tune with the epicurean need to live intensely after the global scare that merely served to highlight the obvious: “we are fragile.” And also ephemeral, like delicate cigarette papers that burn as they oxidise while exhaling and expiring oxygen and carbon dioxide, with difficulty. We are clearly ephemeral beings because all life is. A universalist, pan-ecumenical conception, best explained by the recently deceased Chilean biologist and philosopher Humberto Matucana, through his idea of “autopoiesis”, the capacity of the planet and of us as a species to be an organism that is in constant construction, being built biologically, neuronally, psychologically, and thus, as a mass of individuals that behaves like a living being. That which we call “Société”.

For within that organism, languages have evolved exponentially in the last fifty years since the planet became globalised. Everything today is language. “We are an echo (post-Umberto) neither as apocalyptic or as integrated” -paraphrasing De La Nuez and Roma-, we are instead rhizome in a Deleuzean sense. A social animal without organs, with the organs of the senses hyperbolically  hypertrophied through the overdoses imposed by modern life through the everyday barrage of information. Everything is text, picture, reverberation, hollow sound, signs without mystery, transparencies. Tautology, everything is copy and repetition, an infinite carousel. A signifying fragment that swoops down and pummels itself. It becomes body, memory.

Returning to the echo. In relation to this idea of vibration, all of Raúl Cordero’s work, even without his knowing it, is structured through a model system that appears to have been devised by Severo Sarduy. His entire oeuvre seems to me to be a retombeé, a round trip that stands on end and escapes from itself again and again; a baroque breath held in the air, trying to grasp it through ritual slowing down that is the exercise of art, as a reflective and contemplative tool, endowed with knowledge and sensoriality.[1]

Perhaps because much of his work is about lack or absence. For those who understand music in its entirety, absences are silences, empty spaces to be harnessed, to create a vacuous sound; but absence is also reverberation, much more so in quantum times. Ask the astrophysicists. Raúl engages them in dialogue, reverberating[2]. Vibrating like them, from drop to drop, atom to atom, particle to particle falling on the flat medium.

While all individuals in my lifetime have experienced the process of what was once watertight becoming porous, the mixing of impurities, the transfiguration of a monolithic universe into a fractal hybrid one. We are experiencing this in a traumatic way in one way or another, but for Cordero it was a natural process. Maybe because he was already bilingual. And because from very young age he understood the world as a compendium of fragments, never a whole, because the whole is always personal. Unitive. Untested beyond its absorbing limits.

Raúl is a white man raised in a black neighbourhood, El Cerro, a neighbourhood we share, with a musical ear tuned into Afro-transatlantic rhythms[3], academically trained in Fine Arts and Graphic Design in Havana and Amsterdam. He has lived in Stockholm, New York, his hometown and Mexico City, a creative personality that behaves like a palpable amalgam, vulnerable, able to mould himself to his time, piercing it through with his past, his tropicality that becomes learned sensuality, natural elegance, the similarity between the Cuban Royal Palm and Hobbema’s pine forest. A centrifugal capacity that in his present work manifests as a mature conclusion where we can see the dexterity of visual sense and verbal confabulation as a success, sifted by the strength of conceptual critical thinking of high poetic flights of fancy and overwhelming formalistic accuracy. Thanks to his understanding of himself as a polyglot.

Hence, Raúl allows himself the luxury of approaching Spain from the distance of media, painting a series of “stolen images” of virtual videos that promote the Royal Palace in the country’s capital, and mixing them with nineteenth-century graphic vignettes from the press and the British publishing industry, bringing together two gazes from the past, one updated, sacralised through the advertising technique of virtual marketing, and the other, turning to the nostalgia and longing for something naive, naïf, still pure, even when this is just purely recollection. A lucid luddism that Cordero deploys because he is fascinated by the incestuous relationships between nostalgia (and its signs, distress signals)[4] and the new languages of the day to day in the 21st century. Both of these perspectives are executed using the oldest linguistic tools of visuality: painting, the dawn of which, along with several moments of maximum splendour, are definitely a source of pride in the kingdom.

Only someone who does not feel Spanish enough, a Cuban-Mexican is a perfect example, can offend in this sarcastic way the tradition and memory of painting and the memorabilia of what royalty means for our history, in our present. And he does this as a polyglot man, an artist who uses languages as and when they might benefit him in terms of a specific outcome. Knowing that nothing is more political than the poetic, he imbues them with poetic questions.

Hence, his words in light installations refer us to a kind of eternal ready-made, a renaming of the word made light; for that is what words bring: clarity, light, beauty to the things they name. Perhaps, because Raúl is a nostalgically encyclopaedic man in a technological universe, where everything that once contained something sacred has been made frivolous. And everything is former. We are all a former something, a former partner, former spouse, former Cuban, former Caribbean, former American, former photographer, former video artist, former painter.[5]

And there, in that dramatisation of disappearance, in that looking back but stopping the moment you glance back over your shoulder and look to the side, there, Cordero finds a healing fugue, a parodying diversion that relaxes him away from the absent-minded and distracted disproportion of his contemporaries, caught up amidst the grinding of urban music, media narcissism and filial activism, with their predilections and their phobias, forgetting the shades of grey found among those who choose the extremes.

There he remembers that it is in the Hispanic Harlem neighbourhood of New York City, a place he does not belong, where he feels most at home. Where his Puerto Rican, Dominican and Cuban friends live together in a strange peace of admiration and respect and infinite chatter, infinite flexing, infinite seduction and cockiness, where Salsa music is sung in Spanglish, and a Rum and Coke, the famous “Cuba Libre”, is paid for in coin of the realm. But one feels that in such a blend there is a kind of future, a shadow of what’s to come. A future that only polyglots – like Cordero- can dedramatise, turning it into a baroque delight. A baroque created through new languages, becoming neo-baroque, a mechanism of reinvention that he still structures like a unitive artist. Someone who looks us in the eye and says:

-Si solo tienes tu amor… you don’t need anything else babe. So…No more drama! Fall in love with that!

Omar-Pascual Castillo. Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain. Summer 2021.

[1] Indeed, Cordero was the only Cuban artist invited to take part the project Barroco y Neobarroco. El infierno de lo bello, DA2, Salamanca, 2005, co-curated by Javier Panera, Paco Barragán, and myself

[2] Little has been said of Raul’s interest in science. A great deal has been written about his investigations into image, video art, digital art, his experimental and avant-garde status (he is a pioneer in Cuban video art and one of the first to participate in the NFT market), but of his philosophical and scientific readings and concerns, very little. These “particle works,” as it were, give him the opportunity to integrate all his work into a subplot, like his own life. Like all our lives, bound by quantum gravitational fields. It gives him the pretext that unites everything.

[3] In addition to being a House DJ, his main profession which allowed him to live on and off in New York at the start of the Millennium, he also has a vast collection and knowledge of Jazz and all contemporary music in general.

[4] As I said before, he is obsessed by absences. Right from his early pieces, the void, the materiality of the void, and the passage of time have been constant features in his work. Just take a look at his exhibition Todo depende del relato de 1997, held at the Wifredo Lam Centre, and this relationship with nostalgia will be revealed to us.

[5] In relation to this idea, to paraphrase Kevin Power, Raúl was a post-communist artist, post-boom Cuban art, post-modern, post-conceptual, post-exile… “He is a post-almost-everything artist,” he said. See: Raúl Cordero: viéndolo a mi manera, in the publication Raúl Cordero, by Turner Libros, Madrid, Spain. Page 201

Announcing New York representation by Richard Taittinger Gallery

11 August, 2021

We are pleased to announce Raúl Cordero’s New York representation by Richard Taittinger Gallery. And also to share that Cordero’s first solo show at the gallery will take place in the spring of 2022. Richard Taittinger Gallery (New York) joins Mai 36 Galerie (Zürich) and Fredric Snitzer Gallery (Miami) representing the work of Cordero

PRESS RELEASE:
RICHARD TAITTINGER GALLERY is pleased to announce the exclusive New York representation of artist Raúl Cordero.
Raúl Cordero (b. 1971) is a Cuban born conceptual artist known for his blurry paintings that incorporate conceptual text elements. Cordero studied art in Cuba at Academia San Alejandro and Instituto Superior de Diseño before moving to do postgraduate work at Graphic Media Development Centre and Rijksakademie Van Beeldende Kunsten in the Netherlands. Cordero’s work mixes figurative elements, often blurred or abstracted with dissonant dotted text, inviting the viewer to explore the dialogue between the text and the image. Cordero’s work is rooted in contemporary ideas and issues and investigates the relationship between reading and looking.
Cordero’s work is in several public collections worldwide, including the Musée National D’Art Moderne Centre Pompidou in Paris, France; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (MOCA), The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, The Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) and the Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale, in the United States of America; El Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, in Cuba; The Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (SMAK) in Gent, Belgium; El Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno (CAAM) and Museo Extremeño e Iberoamericano de Arte Contemporáneo (MEIAC) in Spain, among others.

RICHARD TAITTINGER GALLERY was founded in 2014 by Richard Frerejean Taittinger at 154 Ludlow Street. A 6,000 sq ft space on 3 floors designed by Studio MDA. A pioneer of New York City’s Lower East Side art scene, today RTG is surrounded by cultural institutions including the New Museum, the International Center for Photography, and the Brant Foundation. RTG represents a diverse roster of leading international artists at various stages of their careers covering every medium and photography. Working closely with Museum curators, RTG had successfully placed works by our artists in over 24 prestigious Museum collections. RTG advocates for price transparency and democratization of the art world showing artists from outside the traditional art world system together with established talents. In 2019 RTG launched a print program offering affordable works starting at $500 to encourage collecting. RICHARD TAITTINGER GALLERY supports artists attuned to ethical values, human rights, diversity, feminism, and environmental issues.

See at Richard Taittinger Gallery’s Home Page

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    • Raúl Cordero and The Measure of Art
    • Raúl Cordero: Video Without Video Equipment
    • New Rules of the Game: Painting As Process
    • Being Raúl Cordero: Aporias of Painting
    • Raúl Cordero: Seeing it my way
    • Painting… and why not?
    • La pintura de Raúl Cordero o la sacralidad de la imagen
  • REPRESENTATION
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Upcoming Exhibitions

Raúl Cordero “HEAVEN IS A PLACE IN THE MIND” (solo). Richard Taittinger Gallery, New York. Opening: March 10th, 2022.

Raúl Cordero and Barry Schwabsky: “THE POEM” (solo). Interactive installation at Times Square, New York City. March 30th/April 28th, 2022.

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Raúl Cordero Studio
  • NEWS
  • ARTWORK
    • 2021
    • 2020 – 2019
    • 2018 – 2017
    • 2016 – 2015
    • 2014 – 2013
    • 2012 – 2011
    • 2010 – 2009
    • 2008 – 2007
    • 2006 – 2002
    • 2001 – 1996
    • VIDEO WORK ARCHIVES
  • CHRONOLOGY
  • VIDEOS
  • PUBLICATIONS
  • TEXTS
    • Raúl Cordero: An Art of Transition
    • Raúl Cordero and The Measure of Art
    • Raúl Cordero: Video Without Video Equipment
    • New Rules of the Game: Painting As Process
    • Being Raúl Cordero: Aporias of Painting
    • Raúl Cordero: Seeing it my way
    • Painting… and why not?
    • La pintura de Raúl Cordero o la sacralidad de la imagen
  • REPRESENTATION
  • CONTACT