RAÚL CORDERO “Die Neue Bukolisch”. Solo show @ Nova Invaliden Galerie, Berlin. (April 29th – June 20th, 2016)
Posted on May 5, 2016
Raúl Cordero
PRESS RELEASE
Raúl Cordero, born in Havana, Cuba, in 1971, studied art in his native city at both the Academia San Alejandro and the Instituto Superior de Diseño; and later in the Netherlands at the Graphic Media Development Centre and the Rijksakademie Van Beeldende Kunsten. He has held visiting professorships at the Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana, The San Francisco Art Institute in California and the Art Academy of Cincinnati, in Ohio, U.S.A. Cordero lives and works in Mexico City. His work can be seen in the collections of several leading institutions such as the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the LA County Museum of Art (LACMA) and The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles; in the U.S.A.. Nova Invaliden Galerie is now pleased to present Raúl Cordero first solo show in Berlin. Die neue bukolisch presents five new paintings by Cordero, as a continuation of the Transient Poetry solo show he did in April 2015 at Mai 36 Galerie, in Zürich.
Cordero’s earlier work was focused on the uses of videoart, installation and photography in relation to how painting can establish a dialog with these new artistic languages. In the last decade, Cordero has approached painting from a post-conceptual position, incorporating two problems, which have always been present in his practice. On the one hand, the question about how we coexist with images, and on the other, the unfolding of visual production strategies’ inclusion into the perverse, arbitrary and contradictory global universe of contemporary art. In order to do so, he uses a strategy of distraction, in which he combines his exemplary Post-Richter mannerism of Wet on Wet painting, incorporating written inscriptions where words take a significance beyond the purely conceptual and they enter the field of discourse. The gesture of investigating the historical genres in pre-modern painting becomes obvious after his obsession with The Avenue at Middelharnis, 1689, from Meindtert Hobbema, which to this day can be seen as an ironic strategy to raise a bucolic way of facing the pictorial fact, in a result which is disturbing, given its perfectionism – from the formal point of view – and intelligent – from the narrative point of view –. These works have the qualities of “transitory poetics” and show an undisputable maturity that offers the necessary freedom to keep painting today, instead of doing something else.
Nova Invaliden Galerie is pleased to do this show in collaboration with Mai 36 Galerie, In Zürich, Switzerland.
