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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.
--Joe Bakal
About the Artist
About the Artists
Painter and sculptor Louie Cordero began an active exhibiting career while pursuing his Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of the Philippines. After graduating in 2001, he became a core member of the painting collective Surrounded by Water and artist-in-residence with the artist-run initiative Big Sky Mind. His work explored imagery and narratives at the nexus of Philippine Catholicism, politics, mass culture, mining the collective consciousness of the Pinoy everyman with a humorous edge. He won the Grand Prize (Painting), 8th Annual Freeman Foundation Vermont Studio Centre in 2002-3. In 2005, he co-founded Future Prospects alternative art space. He is the creator of Nardong Tae, the underground comics of cult status in the Philippines.
Fascinated with kitschy outsider aesthetics and colonial-era leftovers, acrylic has become Cordero's medium of choice in painting since 2005 as he turned towards the super-flat aesthetics of spray-painted Philippine jeepneys and other waning commercial art forms. He received the Cultural Centre of the Philippines 13 Artists Awards in 2006 and earlier. Solo exhibitions overseas include DELUBYO (Giant Robot, Los Angeles, 2008), Actuality/Virtuality (3 Sogoku Warehouse, Fukuoka, 2003), Soft Death (Osage, Hong Kong and Singapore, 2009) and Sacred Bones (Jonathan Levine Gallery, New York, 2010). The recent years display an intensity in the bricolage-method of image construction that takes us through a thrill ride through unbridled imaginations and rerouted libidos, coupled with awkward rendering and visionary courage. His work has been included in World of Painting, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Australia, 2008; Coffee, Cigarettes and Pad Thai, Eslite Gallery, Taipei, 2008; Singapore Biennale 2011; the 14th Jakarta Biennale, 2011; and PANORAMA, Singapore Art Museum, 2012.
Cordero’s puzzling, imploring, and visually striking juxtapositions are often punctuated by blood and gore, as if to imply the history of violence and bloodshed that his nation and people have sustained. Cordero’s artwork makes references to his native Philippines, a nation rich with diversity—the result of multiple changes in political regime and subjugation throughout its history. With a complex mixture of eastern and western influences, the cultural fabric of The Republic of The Philippines is a unique combination of ethnic heritage and traditions, composed of indigenous folklore, Asian customs and Spanish legacy reflective in the names and religion.
Figures from Filipino mythology and its strong oral tradition are referenced through the artist’s gruesome monsters and zombies, while another source of inspiration derived from his nationality involves the Jeepney (U.S. military vehicles abandoned after WWII, and converted by locals to use as public transportation). Each Jeepney, unique and elaborately decorated in vibrant colors, features an ornate mash-up of pop and religious iconography. By combining these elements, varied and obscure (to Westerners), with imagery appropriated from Cordero’s assorted interests including kitsch, Indian advertising, cult American b-movies, and pulp horror, the contrasting influences reflect the complex diversity of the artist’s heritage itself.
Related Exhibitions
About the Artists
About the Artist
Painter and sculptor Louie Cordero began an active exhibiting career while pursuing his Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of the Philippines. After graduating in 2001, he became a core member of the painting collective Surrounded by Water and artist-in-residence with the artist-run initiative Big Sky Mind. His work explored imagery and narratives at the nexus of Philippine Catholicism, politics, mass culture, mining the collective consciousness of the Pinoy everyman with a humorous edge. He won the Grand Prize (Painting), 8th Annual Freeman Foundation Vermont Studio Centre in 2002-3. In 2005, he co-founded Future Prospects alternative art space. He is the creator of Nardong Tae, the underground comics of cult status in the Philippines.
Fascinated with kitschy outsider aesthetics and colonial-era leftovers, acrylic has become Cordero's medium of choice in painting since 2005 as he turned towards the super-flat aesthetics of spray-painted Philippine jeepneys and other waning commercial art forms. He received the Cultural Centre of the Philippines 13 Artists Awards in 2006 and earlier. Solo exhibitions overseas include DELUBYO (Giant Robot, Los Angeles, 2008), Actuality/Virtuality (3 Sogoku Warehouse, Fukuoka, 2003), Soft Death (Osage, Hong Kong and Singapore, 2009) and Sacred Bones (Jonathan Levine Gallery, New York, 2010). The recent years display an intensity in the bricolage-method of image construction that takes us through a thrill ride through unbridled imaginations and rerouted libidos, coupled with awkward rendering and visionary courage. His work has been included in World of Painting, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Australia, 2008; Coffee, Cigarettes and Pad Thai, Eslite Gallery, Taipei, 2008; Singapore Biennale 2011; the 14th Jakarta Biennale, 2011; and PANORAMA, Singapore Art Museum, 2012.
Cordero’s puzzling, imploring, and visually striking juxtapositions are often punctuated by blood and gore, as if to imply the history of violence and bloodshed that his nation and people have sustained. Cordero’s artwork makes references to his native Philippines, a nation rich with diversity—the result of multiple changes in political regime and subjugation throughout its history. With a complex mixture of eastern and western influences, the cultural fabric of The Republic of The Philippines is a unique combination of ethnic heritage and traditions, composed of indigenous folklore, Asian customs and Spanish legacy reflective in the names and religion.
Figures from Filipino mythology and its strong oral tradition are referenced through the artist’s gruesome monsters and zombies, while another source of inspiration derived from his nationality involves the Jeepney (U.S. military vehicles abandoned after WWII, and converted by locals to use as public transportation). Each Jeepney, unique and elaborately decorated in vibrant colors, features an ornate mash-up of pop and religious iconography. By combining these elements, varied and obscure (to Westerners), with imagery appropriated from Cordero’s assorted interests including kitsch, Indian advertising, cult American b-movies, and pulp horror, the contrasting influences reflect the complex diversity of the artist’s heritage itself.
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