Words are Wind

Federico Luger (FL GALLERY) is proud to present “Words are Wind”, the first solo exhibition in Italy by the Cuban artist Raúl Cordero. By means of recurring motives that he transforms and revisits, Cordero has created a universe of his own through his work, using computers and printing media to construct images that will finally become traditional oil paintings. Taking his deep knowledge of the western tradition of painting as a frame of reference, his work constantly revolutionizes the pictorial process by relying on contemporary technological breakthroughs. He uses this technology to celebrate the grandiloquence of the most important and historically innovative medium in art history: Painting.
The relationship between what is apparently “old”, or “new” is also very important in Cordero’s work. We live in a time when, due to the rapid pace at which technology has been replacing science and intellectual rigor, something “new” appears every single day —even in art. “New” is not a value anymore; it is a daily condition. For this reason, Cordero focuses on the symbolism of the obsolete, of what is no longer “useful”, but rather exists only for its aesthetic and ethical importance. This also grounds his preference for painting and its classical themes, such as landscapes, seascapes, architecture and portraits, whose importance nowadays is also more symbolic than functional, given that the slow and obsessive way of creating a traditional painting is inconsistent with the speed at which images are “obtained” these days.
For this exhibition Raúl Cordero will present eight new paintings, which depict different open air situations, including Landscapes, Architecture, Sailboats, etc. The images, done in subdued colors, represent the cohabitation of both a deconstructed figuration (soft-edge) and the abstract forms (hard-edge), as well as a very personal way of adding and overlapping texts referring to the daily experience of making art nowadays. These texts are pierced to semi-transparent elements that feign the crystalline “windows”, distorting the classical figure-ground perception. As a result, his work connects the figurative pictorial language with its subsequent metamorphosis into abstraction and the spirit of modernism. While at the same time, it questions how visual language has given a way to the textual information in contemporary art.