In his fourth solo show at MO_Space, opening October 19, Louie Cordero continues his

obsession with the ornate and the grotesque. A devotee of B movies, horror comics, kitsch, and

surrealist art, Cordero explores images of dread and dark humor in his new work.

Most of the paintings feature heads experiencing bizarre mutations and deformations.

Insomniac and paranoid, these figures seem locked in states of mental anguish—their thoughts

pressurized so much their heads and bodies erupt in waves of skin, lesions, and tumors. In

extremis, their faces even sprout faces.

These figures appear as representations of artistic consciousness straining to expel its

imaginings and anxieties—a creative drive pushing past the point of exhaustion and

constipation. A self-referential thread runs through the work: We find the artist in his studio

vexed to nightmare by the call of a house lizard (“Almost Dawn”); transfixed by a black vortex on

a smartphone screen (“The Choice”); and haunted by the childhood memory of being attacked

by a stray dog (“Midnight Paralysis”).

With skins resembling organs’ inner linings, Cordero’s figures turn their psychological turmoil

inside out. The surfaces bear the artist’s almost pathological attention to detail, repulsing as well

as attracting. The closer we look, the more the skins quiver, fold, and pucker up.

In this exhibit, Cordero’s colors are vivid and yet—compared to his earlier work—more subdued,

a change the artist credits to his move to an idyllic residence in the foothills of Cuenca,

Batangas.

Cordero also continues his experimentations with painted frames—as seen in “Homo Proteus

(The Understander of the Future),” “Omega Is the Alpha,” and “Gaiking Go (The Shadow of the

World)”—where the obsessive abstract patterns of his earlier phase seem to have been exiled

from the pictorial plane and spill out onto the margins.

The centerpiece of the exhibit is “Arise (Ghetto Politics and Its Infinite Cycle),” a diptych, which

uses the technique—adapted by comic books from the art of film—of setting up an establishing

shot on one panel, followed by a closeup shot on a succeeding panel. This montage technique,

this blending of painting and comic book conventions, is novel to Cordero. “Arise” is also a

departure in its less-subtle sociopolitical critique: It depicts the practice of local politicians who,

come election season, demolish perfectly passable roads so that they can make a spectacle of

“rebuilding” them and thereby win over voters.

In all, this exhibit presents old and new directions for Cordero, pointing perhaps to further

possibilities: a convergence of personal and sociopolitical comorbidities.

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--Joe Bakal

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