furball

“Terror is a man” and horror is our fascination for it. Whatever
comes out of its fanged gnawing mouth leaves no absolute space for
thinking, its awesome indescribability drawn from the probability of
the unseen or even the unimaginable come alive. This re-engagement
with the morbid fantasy of prepubescent awakening by Fangoria and
Clive Barker mixed in with the horror vacui- jeepney graphics
profusely converge in Louie Cordero’s latest exhibit Absolute Horror
opening at Mo_space on June 28 until July27 2008.

The works, composed of paintings in acrylic and sculptures incarnated
from Cordero’s past paintings and a myriad ballpoint-pen drawing
studies bear images of guts, innards and brains spilling out in
fluorescent hues of pink and ochre meatiness – even the clouds in a
painting with a mermaid belie its wispiness in its solid delineation
of puffiness. Any aspiration for divine sublimity is instantly
grounded to b-movie pulp. Yet however clichéd the plot lines these
movies take, the integral that binds them is the attempt at a moral or
a simplistic lesson in causal consequences of an accident of nature or
a lapse in judgment however minor that is. Mystics do seem to follow
the same path of causal logic in deciphering their coded imagery in
foretelling almost always an apocalyptic future, in apoplectic rapture
they speak from the “beyond” as though embodying the vision itself.

Beyond the canvas however, there is only mounting banality encountered
in the mass media and its byproducts consumed unwittingly by its very
makers, an institutionalized anthropophagy of the vicarious essence of
the represented. This by far is what fuels most body-slasher-horror
flicks, i.e. “demons” preying upon clueless virgins to act as host and
dummy for their murderous schemes or deranged recluses hacking
hitchhikers for their skin, and thereafter their used bodies disposed
of in an Ab-Ex bloodbath.

With their reproducibility, images have also become inured in their
disposability. Pictures have become pictures of other pictures. The
canvas, more than ever, willfully plays host to these multiple
transmogrification. The skill however, in copying and transferring
these images onto the canvas can be learned without innate genius, and
especially if the goal is pedagogic propaganda.
Pictures in this way, like horror flicks or any film for that matter
lose their immediate hold of wonder. Dissected in many ways by
theories and turned on its head by their self-consciousness, they
become stale bad jokes for the senile. For Cordero, they just become
boring academic art. He tries to achieve flatness in his paintings
not from the art historical precedent of a Greenberg modernism, but
from the perspective of a billboard painter or a jeepney sticker
artist. His very symmetrical composition is not so much derived from a
mindful memorization of the laws of balance but rather from mimicking
the sincere attempts to perfection by self-taught artisans. This
deskilling process for Cordero is his way of recapturing the wonder
that once set him also to paint and make pictures which has become
lost to him ironically in school. This is best exemplified in one
work entitled The Individual (The Flock of Wrongs), where a kneeling
figure in white oxfords is praying to a giant idol reminiscent of Alex
Gray’s visionary 2D plastinated humans/new agers in yoga trance.
Behind this figure with exposed anatomy is a row of paintings copied
from the website The Museum of Bad Art. Rizalista symbols add to the
surfeit of esoteric popism via the Masonic pyramid and the brown-robed
priestess.

Art begins with the spectacular or so what Cordero wants to effect in
his works. The spilled brains may have been his simplistic
illustration for leaving out the thinking and just be zombies for a
moment. Or is it rather that the brains are what has become of art –
an overfed mutant itching to break out of its host to feed on another?
Or is this the nightmare of dead reckoning the practice of painting
in a perennially disaffected host?

“Oh your collegiate grief has left you dowdy in sweatshirts/ Absolute
horror!” ( Vampire Weekend)

ABSOLUTE HORROR
June 28 until July 27
MO_SPACE
3rd level, Mos Design
Bonifacio High Street, Bonifacio Global City, Fort taguig Philippines
Tel.No.+632 856-2745

Thanks and see you there!