There is a curious entity that surrounds a Louie Cordero painting, which does not merely ascribe to the peculiar frame he has devised and has ingeniously designed for each piece. These frames, though—coated in a bustle of neon splashes or eccentric art deco patterns—encapsulate an idea: that the range for finding creative expression and delivering new sensory experience should exceed a canvas’s surface. In turning the frames for his paintings into objects for artistic expression, the usually restrained images engulfed by dull, disconnected strips of woodwork from a craft (no offense intended to the unsuspecting framer or carpenter) oblivious to the phenomenon it is trying to frame and is trying to contextualize, suddenly breaks free from a kind of silence. It is a ploy that stops art from its tracks, this silence brought upon by the incoherence of ready-made frames. It is a silence commenced by the frame’s ability to interrupt, when a work of art may otherwise feel the need to extend the conversation.

This is the whole idea, then; the same way it has been continually arrived upon through a large number of his previous works: that imagination and consciousness are always extended, whether inside or outside the frame. The imagination that Cordero casts—in paintings, objects, sculptures, or other wall-bound works—continue to extend itself, to wander and loiter around the unclaimed recesses that lie between the familiar and the strange, the somber and the comical, the aesthetic and the grotesque. Moreover, it carries out its excursions every time a curfew is set in place, wandering while logic and belief is suspended. The result is a deranged hierarchy of forms, a meltdown, accentuated by the oozing appendages and innards from each of his painted characters. And reflected from these strings of deformities are the effects of other influences: modernist and futurist sensibilities combined with folk and local practices; surreal narratives mixed with popular imagery; and artisan techniques fused with meticulous design processes.

When looking at Cordero’s most recent series of wall-bound sculptures, the confluence of its different origins becomes apparent: on one hand is the attention placed into creating cubist and abstract forms, while on the other is its compliance to primitive and organic shapes. Even the materials and techniques used fuse together the realm of high and low art: the fiberglass as the surface, and the airbrush applied which mimics the ‘sprayed-over’ layering used in coloring the chassis of Manila’s jeepneys. It sustains a blended palette of color, a kind of crude sfumato that speaks of its own renaissance through the ingenious techniques of unheralded local artisans. It is a departure from Cordero’s own solid outlines of fundamental colors which he tries to achieve throughout his paintings. His new set of paintings, which focuses on a central figure instead of disjointed narratives, speaks of its own innovation within and outside the painted surface. Animate figures, spurred into action by situations that implore their existence, become the subject matter for his usual juxtaposition of incoherent elements within the frame. We see familiar figures set against fantastical components; we perceive the images from real-life—peering eyes, a set of hands, a pair of sneakers—against abstract and formalist representations of symbols and shapes. Which now brings us back into describing the way they are framed: each image has its own ‘customized’ frame, ornamented and imbued with character, much like a Manila jeepney’s body, which is contextualized through the artworks that embody her.

The frame, which is a work of expression in itself, recontextualizes painting. It removes it from its own vacuum of existence, separated from the world through a fence of wooden borders. In Louie Cordero’s works, the border becomes an extension of the world within as it tries to encompass the visual landscape of his own locality, Malabon, Manila, all the way to the legendary airbrush craftsmanship found in Pililia, Rizal. For him, these are influences. And influences are, nevertheless, the extensions of a world that found its way inside an object through art.

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