Raúl Cordero

Raúl Cordero is a contemporary artist born in Havana, Cuba, in 1971, who currently resides in Mexico City. He studied fine arts and design at Academia San Alejandro and ISDI in Havana, and later at the Graphic Media Development Centre and the Rijksakademie Van Beeldende Kunsten in Holland.

Cordero's work centers on the interaction between art and culture, with conceptual references to the cultural conditions in which art is created. He uses computers and printing media to construct images that eventually become traditional oil paintings, constantly revolutionizing the pictorial process by relying on contemporary technological breakthroughs while also celebrating the grandiloquence of painting as a historically significant medium.

Cordero is interested in the relationship between what is perceived as old or new in contemporary art, and he often incorporates symbolism of the obsolete into his work. His paintings combine deconstructed figuration and abstract forms, as well as texts that are pierced into semi-transparent elements that feign crystalline windows, distorting the classical figure-ground perception. This approach connects the figurative pictorial language with its subsequent metamorphosis into abstraction and modernism, while also questioning the role of visual language in contemporary art.