Raúl Cordero: The Seers

Los Angeles— The Seers, from Raúl Cordero’s newest series, will opens from April 7 to May 26, 2018 at the Edward Cella Art & Architecture. The artist’s first exhibition in Los Angeles in more than a decade features four new paintings and four carved marble sculptures that investigate a place where memory, reoccurring dreams, and fixations meet for the artist.

Each painting and sculpture in the exhibition draws on Cordero’s encounters with clairvoyants, also known as seers, whom he describes as “those who always try to see further.” Recalling his fascination with his experiences he states, “curiously at such meetings, one is always required by those persons to stare first at a certain object that in turn, becomes the center of the sitting.” Extracting from his sessions and recurrent dreams, Cordero employs images, of chandeliers, an A-frame house, and twin cabins, that have appeared to him. The resulting mysterious dream-like images have soft-edges that alter the figure-ground perception and enigmatic patterns of text. Recognizing in his spiritual investigation an analogous process of watching cinema or viewing an artwork; Cordero declares, “this suite is dedicated to that amazing human virtue of looking and thinking.”

As described by curator Axel Jablonski, “Raúl Cordero’s paintings are rooted in an awareness that the medium of film, with all its possibilities, has a far greater effect on present-day perceptions than images like photographs have.” Over thirty years, the artist’s central aim is to challenge the viewer to consider the perception of a world constantly bombarded with text and images through oscillating forms of communication. At the same time, his works question how visual language has given way to textual information in contemporary art.

Jablonski goes on to say, “Cordero’s interest is in the point at which a work actually begins, and the processes and ideas it undergoes on the way to becoming an artwork, is expressed in the descriptive annotations and multilayered references to other media and artworks, which the frame of reference in his painting keeps in constant motion, without end.”