Louie Cordero
Published August 15, 2020
Zombie skin mutants, masses of fused cartoon innards, walking/talking turds, floating cigarette smoking eyeballs -- these are just some of Filipino artist Louie Cordero's brain-melting iconography.
He reconfigures these easily with tropes and techniques from art or from a knowledge of what could be considered outsider art, like the African painted movie posters. It goes to show that many of Cordero's decisions in the making of his work aren't a flippant attempt to be weird but carefully consider many image sources. As he puts it, his work is the output of "how he relates to different art languages."
But Louie Cordero seems to have always been sympathetic to the outsiders or the weird, as evidenced by the characters that inhabit his work or their tragicomic narratives. Nardong Tae comes to mind. Nevertheless, his works are never zany, fluffy, or cute, unlike some of who may be considered copycats.
Cordero really doesn't care if you take him seriously or not. He refuses to be drawn into pretentious discussions about the political implications of his work or even the their validity as art. In an interview with Sainte Pulchérie Fransız Lisesi, he says, "My work is quite simple. Being politicized is too big to handle for me. It's just about painting and images. I don't want to declare something. I made it and it's up to you if you think if it's art or not.”
